By SHANNON O. WELLS
When Pitt takes the lead on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant that involves partners from foreign countries, the University commonly requests the money and distributes it to the foreign “subs,” and monitors what they’re doing.
Based on a recent NIH administrative notice following a barrage of executive orders reducing or terminating federal research funding, that will no longer be the practice.
“The NIH has said we don’t want to do it like that anymore,” said Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research. Now, the NIH says Pitt and other universities will need to tell the agency who their foreign partners are, and then NIH will figure out a way to fund them directly and not nest that money inside the awards.
Despite arguments about this approach being “better for managing” and tracking of spending, Rutenbar said the problem is the NIH is banning new awards from having this sub-award structure, with promised guidance for how they want it to be approached not expected until around September.
“So we’ve got a six-month-ish delay,” he explained. “More problematically, they have been very clear that they will not support any renewals on awards in this period, or at all going forward — no renewals on awards that have active foreign sub-awards.”
Rutenbar shared the news during his report at the Senate Research Committee’s May 16 meeting, its last of the 2024-25 academic year. It was one of several developments stemming from White House executive orders that have disrupted higher education research funding and planning, including an order banning gain-of-function research and 15% indirect cost rate caps for federal research agencies.
A common instance involving active foreign sub-awards, Rutenbar noted, is a multinational clinical trial that has human subjects in other countries. “And the NIH has been very clear that your two options going forward if you want to renew the award, … you can work to move the international work to be domestic in the U.S., or (NIH) will help you shut it down.”
This, he explained, presents a “significant problem” for awards with active international engagements, especially those involving active multinational clinical trials.
“And we’re tracking who’s impacted by that. Pretty much all of those impacted are across the health sciences. Not a big surprise,” he said. “Leadership in the health sciences is on top of this. We’re trying to figure out what’s to be done there, especially those awards (where) we’re expecting a renewal, and those who are trying to do something new from scratch.
“In the absence of concrete guidance, we know what they won’t allow,” he added. “We don’t quite know what they will. So, that’s problematic.”
In other research funding news, Rutenbar said the regular flow of National Science Foundation (NSF) award cuts from earlier this spring seems to have ended, while rate caps around indirect costs face legal challenges.
A recent judicial action led to the suspension of NIH’s earlier call to cut all indirect costs to 15%, as well as a temporary restraining order against a rate cap for the Department of Energy (DOE), he explained.
The NSF also dropped a proposal to drop their rate cap to 15% “with a new wrinkle.”
“It was for future NSF awards, not for current NSF awards, unlike the previous DOE and NIH efforts,” Rutenbar said. “It didn’t affect everything you had now,” but affects future awards.
“Pitt was part of a lawsuit on that one, as a declarant. We wrote a declaration of what irreparable harms would come to Pitt as a result of that,” he said of the suit filed in early May. “We’re waiting to see what happens there in that space.”
New collaboration
Rutenbar also shared that a group of national organizations representing academic, medical and independent research institutions — including the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), American Council on Education (ACE), and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) — along with other experts, have joined forces to help develop a more efficient and transparent model for funding indirect costs on federal research grants.
Rutenbar called the Joint Associations Group on Indirect Costs a “counter to administration attempts to simply drop it to a flat 15%, which would be vastly damaging to everybody in the research enterprise,” he said.
The goal, he added, is to create “simpler models, things that are easier to explain … transparent and still do what they need to do to pay for the foundational infrastructure.”
Rutenbar said he’s taken part in some of the town halls. “We’re connected with those folks. It’s a very good group,” he added, which includes R1- and R2-designated schools. “(It advocates for) anybody who might be trying to send a proposal to a federal sponsor and finds a 15% flat indirect rate untenable and unworkable.
“They’re trying to get something in front of some congressional colleagues relatively soon.”
The effort is run by Kelvin Droegemeier, a research meteorologist who served as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the first Trump administration.
“The hope is to see something moved into legislation that would be a different, better, acceptable model,” Rutenbar said. “That relationship, we think, will be a helpful thing for us … Stay tuned.”
Dramatic cuts
Rutenbar also updated the Research committee on the “skinny budget” outline submitted by President Trump’s administration.
“It’s the administration’s broader goals for what individual agencies and components of the federal government, what their budget ought to be,” he said. “It’s also not law. It is essentially the president’s vision for what the numbers should be, which is transmitted to Congress, and then Congress can say yes or no.”
The budget had a “pretty dramatic set of cuts across the research enterprise,” he added, including to the DOE, NIH, NSF and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and others.
The Department of Energy cut is 9%, or $4.7 billion, and up to a 56% cut at NSF for what is “today a $10 billion organization. The proposal would take it down to about a $5 billion organization,” Rutenbar noted. “So those are significant problems. It’s not legislation. It’s a vision for where things are.”
When similar cuts were proposed during the first Trump administration, he explained, “Congress always pushed back and said, ‘No, we think funding the American science enterprise is important.’ We’ll see what happens this time.
“We’re closely engaged in advocacy efforts on (Capitol Hill) on a very regular basis,” he said, noting that Chancellor Joan Gabel is very well connected with a variety of organizations. “We’re pretty closely engaged on that one, as is basically every chancellor of every R1 and every VP of research of every R1.”
Offering guidance
Following his report, Rutenbar addressed a committee member’s question about what the Pitt’s Research administration was doing to bridge funding gaps resulting from recent grant terminations.
“The current thinking on this one is still that this is something that the schools are basically going to be leaning in to figure out what’s possible,” he said. “My team is in contact with everybody whose award is terminated, because there’s a lot of mechanics involved in figuring out how you turn off an award, especially awards that have human subjects or animals or community partners …
“But this is the first order. … We’re referring people back to their deans,” he said, clarifying that around 70 grants have been terminated thus far.
“I’m not happy that it’s 70. I’m happy that it’s not 100, right?” he said. “We saw the first wave of cuts with NIH that everybody saw. Then we had some in the second wave from NIH. The National Endowment for the Humanities also saw some very significant cuts,” along with the Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Rutenbar clarified that some termination numbers reported in the media are not entirely accurate based on how awards are distributed and tracked.
“Not every agency is offering tracking for the awards they’ve terminated,” he explained. “The NIH has a tracker site for this … the NSF does not. And so there’s some crowdsourcing things that are doing this. They’re not always super accurate.”
Also, when an award is terminated, its total value is not lost. “One loses the amount of the award one has not spent yet. … When a faculty member wins an award from a federal sponsor, we don’t get a check,” he said. “We get a … notice of award, which is an obligation. If you send us an invoice for the work you just did, we’ll pay it.”
What is lost is the amount of dollars a researcher hasn’t yet spent. “So, if you’re already very close to the end of your award, you didn’t lose a lot of money. If you were at the beginning of your award, you lose a lot of money.”
One large USAID award termination, he explained, was a “multi-institution number, and the prime on that was not Pitt. The folks who were leading that (likely) saw a very large cut. We did not. … So there’s a bit of a caution, when you see people publishing numbers.”
Responding to a question about what Pitt is doing regarding legal action to help those with terminated grants, Rutenbar said the University has filed several appeals.
Of the 30-day window to appeal, he said Pitt provides guidance where it can.
“This is a justification for why the termination was incorrect (or) inappropriate,” he said. “So we connect them with their dean to make sure that everybody is in the loop on the potential of an appeal.
“What we don’t know at the moment is anything like a timeline on when (appeals) will be read and when we might hear something back,” he added. “We don’t have any sense of likelihood of success yet. … There’s a lot of appeals happening. We’re in a kind of a waiting mode.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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