Regarding the NIH’s New Policy Guidance on Indirect Costs

Dear Members of the Carnegie Mellon Research Community:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted new policy guidance late Friday, Feb. 7, that caps the facilities and administrative (F&A, or indirect cost recovery) rate for NIH grants at 15%. If this guidance stands, the F&A cap will go into effect on Monday, Feb. 10, and it will be applied to future expenses on all current NIH grants as well as new NIH grants awarded to institutions of higher education.

This change would have immediate and sweeping consequences on the ability of universities across America to fund essential infrastructure and services required to support groundbreaking research that advances human health and improves lives.

F&A costs are essential to conducting world-class research. Federal agencies partially reimburse universities for expenses that are difficult to attribute to specific research projects — for example, construction and maintenance of research facilities and labs, compliance with federal regulations and guidelines, research computing infrastructure, data security, financial management, and many other costs. Several online resources are available to learn more about F&A costs, including this excellent video suggested by the Association of American Universities (AAU).

As we have experienced over the last few weeks, federal policies that impact research funding at universities are evolving rapidly. Carnegie Mellon’s leadership, with the support of our Government Relations team, is taking an all-hands-on-deck approach; we are engaging our elected officials, advocacy and professional organizations, counterparts at Pennsylvania’s research universities and many of our national peers. President Farnam Jahanian is also working with our AAU peers on a collective response in order to limit the detrimental impact of this policy change at NIH and also continue our advocacy campaign in support of the fundamental research that is so critical to our national prosperity and economic competitiveness. University research has directly benefited society in so many ways, and we need to elevate these stories now.

We recognize that this turbulent environment is creating significant uncertainty about current and future research funding for many of you. We will continue to share regular updates on our website, and we encourage you to leverage the funding-questions email for your questions and to send us stories we can share that underscore our research impact. We will also host a second campus-wide meeting for the CMU research community later this week. An email with more details will follow shortly.

We are hopeful that our collective efforts will result in protecting the strong research partnership with the federal government that has made our nation’s research universities the envy of the world.

Sincerely,

James H. Garrett Jr.
Provost and Chief Academic Officer

Theresa Mayer
Vice President for Research