By SHANNON O. WELLS

 

Like most University Senate bodies, the Senate Research Committee took some time off after May, but behind the scenes — in the area of federal funding and new regulations — it was anything but a quiet, status quo kind of summer. 

 

“It's been a summer of responses to federal requests for information (RFIs),” noted Rob Rutenbar, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for research, at the committee’s inaugural meeting of the 2026-27 academic year on Sept. 16. “Depending on which part of the scholarship spectrum you work on, you've seen things coming from Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is related to everything about awards, or things from (National Institutes of Health/NIH) or other parts of the federal ecosystem.”

 

Although courts struck down unilateral executive orders to reduce already-negotiated indirect cost-reimbursement rates from federal agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DoD), the administration is now taking a new approach. 

 

What Rutenbar called a “pivot” toward what’s called “federal rulemaking” comes via the Administrative Procedure Act, which “puts the rulebook in place for how the federal government changes regulations … essentially the guidelines for how laws get operationalized when the law itself doesn't say it,” he explained. 

 

When the federal government decides what it wants to change, the proposal is released on the Federal Register’s website for a comment period. Federal requirements dictate that officials must read and respond to the comments. Agencies must explain whether and how they addressed public comments when they publish the final rule.

 

“If it is the case that the government does not appear to be reading and responding to the individual comments … it opens up the published regulation to federal lawsuits,” Rutenbar noted.

 

The guidance typically goes into place 30 to 90 days after publication. 

 

A 412-page “Uniform Guidance” update from the OMB, which Rutenbar said received approximately 500,000 comments from 50,000 organizations or individuals, includes elements pertaining to publication costs, conference travel, NIH review categories, party collaborations and research security. 

 

The continuing resolution prevents OMB from changing the Uniform Guidance until mid-December.

 

“We'll see what happens, essentially after the election,” he said, noting that was “just one of the things that we did this summer. There were just a bunch of problematic changes.”

 

The meeting outlined these changes in presentations from Rutenbar and Bill Yates, vice chancellor for Research Protections. 

 

The latter’s presentation focused on new DOE conflict-of-interest rules, including more frequent “refresher” training, along with regulations and restrictions related to “countries of concern,” restricted-party lists, gain-of-function research and new biosafety requirements. (see related story) https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/federal-requests-mandates

 

Among the problematic potential changes Rutenbar shared is new guidance that disallows cost reimbursements for publication-related charges. 

 

“There's this argument that publications are some kind of optional thing in research. It's not like a required thing … (but) it's how you get things out. It doesn't just happen,” Rutenbar noted. “Also, if you want to go to a conference, an event associated with your research, you need a certain extensive set of pre-approval. 

 

“You can't just put a budget line in your thing that says, ‘I'm going to go to this conference in June every year and this conference in January every year.’ You need a written note from your program manager saying that it was OK.”

 

What he called the “huge clampdown” on the publication universe prompted strong responses from the research and publications community. 

 

“We responded that this was a problem. The publishers responded, because … the pivot toward not having large parts of the published output of the science enterprise behind a paywall, which was something that happened in the previous administration.” 

 

A way to deal with that is, as opposed to paying for a paywall subscription, having people — through article publication charges up front (APCs) — “to get it managed in the curated ecosystem of whatever publisher you're doing so that it can be open, and everybody can see it.”

 

“One way or another, if you want something to be curated and cyber secure and you want it (and your data set) to be there in 100 years (in journals like) Scientific American and Nature and Science, that costs money.”

 

As a result, publishers, “most of the professional societies” and the science community were “up in arms.

 

“And that's just one thing in this,” he said. “There were just a bunch of these.” 

 

Another such issue is a response, due in October, to how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wants to change its reviewing process, including “moving away from sending detailed scores back.”

 

Of NIH’s “very detailed scoring kind of rubric,” Rutenbar explained its “payline” is based on “if you're this good, we're going to fund you, and they sort of navigate where the payline is.”

 

With the new proposal, there would be just three buckets: 1) highly competitive, 2) competitive, and 3) not discussed.

 

“And that's it. That's all you'd get,” he said of the limited feedback. “We're making arguments that that's not enough granularity.”

 

As opposed to NSF, which Rutenbar said uses five assessment “buckets” from excellent to poor, “and everybody gives you a score (and) comments … If you get three ‘excellents’ and two ‘very goods,’ you have a good shot. But if you get three excellents, two goods and a fair, somebody didn't get it. You know that either they didn't get it, or you didn't write it for them to get it.”

 

He called the NIH’s “highly competitive, competitive, not discussed” model “a very gross instrument. So, we're going to be responding.”

 

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

 

Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.

 

Follow the University Times on Facebook.