Federal Program Aims To Snip Grant Process Red Tape

About a year ago, James O'Brien filed a grant renewal application to support this year's summer program to put five minority undergraduates to work in his scientific labs. A professor in oceanography and meteorology at Honda State University in Tallahassee, O'Brien had received the annual $50,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for several years and expected its renewal to be routine. But a snafu at the federal agency slowed the renewal, so that by May 1, as the students began arriving from around the country to start work, the promised money hadn't reached O'Brien's office. Under normal circumstances, O'Brien might have gone into a panic wondering how he was going to feed five new mouths until the grant-givers got their act together. Instead, during a mid-May interview, O'Brien was worry-free and more than a little thankful that his school is one of 21 institutions participating in a special national project to streamline grant administration. Under the guidelines of this effort, the Federal Demonstration Project (FDP), O'Brien was permitted to simply carry forward some leftover funds from the previous year's grant to fill in the funding gap and put the students to work as soon as they arrived. In the past, O'Brien could have carried forward the funds only after formally requesting per-mission from ONR. And that "would have taken a minimum of six months to get...approved," he says. Saving time, eliminating steps, slashing red tape-this is what the FDP is bent on accomplishing. The result of a joint crusade by federal employees, university administrators, and scientists, the project is designed to reduce the increasing amount of paperwork accompanying federal research grants and contracts. Ultimately it should allow scientists to spend more time doing science and less time filling out forms. Less than a year old, the FDP is already showing some signs of success. Scientists and administrators who have applied its elements say they are seeing time-savings. However, the project is not as broad or as comprehensive as most of its proponents would like. To date, just 10 funding agencies have agreed to participate, and not all of those have uniformly adopted all the program's elements. "We've made a lot of charts" to figure out which agency allows what, says one university administrator. Nevertheless, scientists, administrators, and federal employees seem to agree that the FDP is a good start toward solving a nagging problem. "I see the Federal Demonstration Project as a historic event," says David Mears, the contracts and grants coordinator for the nine-campus University of California system. "For the first time in my experience, federal policy people are sitting down and talking to university people with the goal of making things more efficient." The benefits extend beyond just practical time-saving, some say. "This is, I think, a very important step in recognizing science is really done by people," says Walter Gibson, a physicist at the State University of New York in Albany and a member of one of six FDP committees focusing on improving the program and measuring its results. [It] reduces the we-versus-them attitude." The program is so far succeeding largely because of the "involvement of all kinds of people who've made [the project] their own," says Robert Newton. Newton, now retired and living in Boca Raton, Ha., is generally regarded as the grandfather of the FDP. During many of his 27 years as a senior staff member in the Division of Grants and Contracts at the National Science Foundation, he was a constant and sometimes lone voice arguing for streamlining paperwork as bureaucratic accretion progressed. This bureaucratic growth has been the subject of several federal reports in the last decade. Generally, it has been attributed to a range of causes. At the heart of these has been the growing demand by Congress and various federal bodies for increased accountability by administrators and scientists of just where public money is going and how it is spent. The solution, in many agencies, has been to demand increasingly specific documentation from scientists. The funding agencies, said one agency staffer at a 1985 conference, "have come to view grants more like procurements through which the funding agency is expected to provide every resource that can possibly be justified in terms of direct or indirect costs for conducting a research project, rather than as something in the nature of gifts, which are to be used in the most economical and effective way possible." To make matters worse, competition for research monies has mounted, and scientists have had to routinely increase the number of grants they use to fund work, which previously would have been funded with just one grant. Thus, not only did grants become more difficult to administer, but also there were more grants to manage. Beginning in the late 1970s, a few agencies independently began trying programs to reverse the paperwork buildup. For instance, NSF introduced the Organizational Prior Approval System, which gave NSF grant recipients more leeway in making decisions previously requiring agency approval. Still, by the mid-1980s, government workers, university grants administrators, and scientists felt they were drowning in paper. Additionally, staff at the federal agencies was shrinking, and simple necessity began to drive staffers to want to cut paperwork. The lone voice of Newton had swelled into a chorus, and on June 5, 1985, the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, brought representatives of these groups together to talk about how to solve the paperwork problem. What they came up with was a demonstration project involving five federal agencies (National Institutes of Health, NSF, ONR, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Energy) that were willing to participate with the schools in the Florida State University system and the University of Miami. The Florida schools were selected in part because of the interest of Senator Law-ton Chiles, a Florida Democrat. The project incorporated several procedures that were expected to reduce paperwork and effectively place more trust in scientists and universities to be responsible for their own accountability. These procedures were designed to do the following: Allow investigators, with the approval of funding agencies, to treat related projects as a single administrative and accounting unit. Eliminate the need for prior agency approval for actions that did not change the scope or objective of the research project or change the total amount of funding required. Allow investigators, at their own risk, to incur costs 90 days before the grant award (thus, for instance, allowing investigators to take advantage of sales on equipment). Allow investigators to carry forward unspent grant funds from one funding period to the next. The Florida project was launched on March 1, 1986. Less than six months later, Chiles requested eight universities to prepare a time and cost survey to try to quantify what would be gained by the project, especially if certain elements were expanded nationwide. The study found that if applied nationally, "a potential net redirection of federal resources from administration to science on the order of $60 million is possible. This would result, in large part, from the redirection of more than 600,000 hours of scientific principal investigator time." Then in April 1987, Chiles held a hearing in Orlando, Fla., to call for comments about the progress of the project. The reviews were glowing, but there were still a few pitfalls. For instance, certain state regulations remained in effect, countering the benefits of some streamlining of the federal paperwork. Nevertheless, it was "a tremendous success," says Robert Johnson, vice president for research and graduate studies at Florida State University. Expanded Project Initiated In October 1988, an expanded federal project began. The new project involves 10 agencies and 21 institutions (including the original Florida schools), representing about 70 campuses in 14 states. It is scheduled to continue through the fall of 1990. Then an assessment committee created by the Office of Management and Budget (0MB) and headed by William Raub, deputy director of NIH, will make its recommendations about whether and how to institute the project permanently and the possibility of expansion to other universities. The federal demonstration includes the basic procedures of the Florida project, which gives scientists more responsibility in determining when and how to spend grant money while reducing paperwork. For instance, under the FDP a principal investigator may, with the approval of the funding agencies, combine bookkeeping for different grants if they are spent for related purposes. Donald Marsh, a professor of physiology and chairman of the University Research Committee at the University of Southern California, has two NIH grants that support computer simulation experiments. In the past, he would have to detail in his bookkeeping exactly how much staff and computer time was devoted to one project and how much was devoted to the other, even though the data collected might be shared by each project. "The separation becomes very difficult to see," he says. By applying the relatedness element, Marsh now can treat the projects as a single administrative and accounting unit, saving him from having to write "artfully constructed justifications" to account for the computer costs project-by-project. Despite the apparent advantages of applying the relatedness element, though, it hasn't been used as widely as the FDP's architects expected. The main reason is that many scientists are reluctant to tell one agency that they have another grant that supports some of the same research for fear of suffering a funding cut, says physicist Gibson. Since most agencies already keep grant information on computer data bases accessible to other agencies, the concerns "are not well-founded," he says. Agencies Slow To Join The project's proponents also are disappointed that agencies have been slow to join the expanded program. The tenth member, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, joined in April. And among the participating agencies there are still significant differences concerning the treatment of certain issues. For instance, while NSF doesn't require agency approval for foreign travel, the Office of Naval Research does. "Bureaucrats in any large organization don't like change," says Newton, and it takes them awhile to come around. As the project matures and proves itself to be workable, Charles Paoletti, who is the director of University Business Programs at the Office of Naval Research and a steering committee member of the FDP, expects these problems to diminish. Six task groups composed of university administrators, agency staff, and scientists have been studying ways to improve the FDP. This summer the groups will begin to make recommendations and add new provisions they hope will solve some of the program's glitches as well as expand its usefulness. To the scientists at the participating institutions, this can only be good news. Kathryn Phillips is a freelance writer based in Pasadena, Calif.

Federal Program Aims To Snip Grant Process Red Tape

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