NASA's Ability To Process Research Proposals Is Shutting Down
Keith’s note: If you go to NASA NSPIRES (NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System) website you will see the following notice:
“The NSPIRES Help Desk is not available due to a power outage in the building. Expect responses to your email inquiries within 24 hours. The phone service is not available. If the partial federal shutdown extends past January 31, then NSPIRES will be unavailable due to a lack of funding.”
SMD AA Thomas Zurbuchen issued a series of tweets today via @Dr_ThomasZ: “NASA recognizes that researchers plan research, budgets & hiring 6 – 12 months in advance due to proposal evaluation & selection timelines. Unfortunately, during the shutdown, Notices of Intent (NOIs) and proposal due dates have to be postponed to undetermined future dates. The postponements related to the partial government shutdown have introduced uncertainty into this planning and may lead to some adjustments. A blanket amendment to Research Opportunities in Space and Earth (ROSES) 2018 will be issued, noting that:
1) All due dates should be assumed to be “TBD” as long as the government continues to be shut down.
2) New dates will be announced as soon as possible once the government reopens
3) The ROSES 2019 initially planned on Feb. 14 will be delayed significantly
4) There will be no ROSES-18 or ROSES-19 proposal due dates earlier than 60 days following the end of the partial government shutdown.”
This sounds like Grants that were about to get underway in Jan will be delayed for who knows how long – problem is that that grant money helps support graduate stipends and also undergraduate projects that were to start THIS SEMESTER for our future engineers and scientists that will be needed to continue this country’s myriad successes in aerospace. All because two 70+ year old D and R “leaders” are behaving like 2 year olds.
The system in question doesn’t handle contracts and grants once they are selected. So this semester is in good shape. Well, researchers either had pre-approved funds or their institutions were willing to cover the costs (expecting to recover them when the government reopened) for a month or two.
The problem, however, is the fall semester. This is the system that handles soliciting proposals, submitting them, reviewing them, and the selection process. As Dr. Zurbuchen noted, that can be a long process. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a program that took a full year from submission deadline to having contracts in place. But six to nine months is about right. That means pushing the proposals deadlines back by 55 to 95 days will affect funding in the fall.
These grants are typically funded for three years. When one is going to end, the researchers need to put in proposals for new work about a year in advance. If they don’t, they may have a gap in funding. That’s when this effect of the just-ended shutdown will hit: Six to nine months from now, when old grants have ended and new ones haven’t started because of the delay.
People plan around this. Their own salaries aside, they need to know if they can afford to pay students before the semester starts. If they don’t have students already, they need to hire them if their proposal is funded; if they do have students, and the proposal isn’t funded, they have to find alternate funding or at least warn the students.
I’m also not sure which programs are affected. Dr. Zurbuchen’s tweet said there would be an across the board amendment, and everything would be delayed to at least 60 days from the government restarting. But Twitter isn’t a legal way to make changes to solicitations, and there hasn’t been any notice of an amendment through official channels. (I hope that doesn’t mean Dr. Zurbuchen will get in trouble, but no one is happy about this and sometimes people complain or blame the wrong person.)
What I have seen is program due dates amended on a program-by-program basis. Those changed the deadlines to TBD and went out a week to ten days before the previously planned deadline. I have no idea what that means for programs with deadlines in February, for programs which would have been due next week (already amended to TBD), or those which would have been due already. I do know the work involved in reviewing and selecting proposals, and then getting the contracts in place. Even with the government restarted, they do not have the people to work off a backlog. So I suspect everything is going to be pushed back by some amount.