A message to the campus from Mike Malone and Laura Vandenberg on 2/10/25
Dear Colleagues,
Last Friday, we hosted a campus listening session where we addressed questions from researchers across campus about the state of federally-funded research on our campus and across the country. At that time, we shared much of the advice we have provided by email about both proposal submissions and awards, which is also available on the R&E news site.
We are writing today with additional guidance about three issues:
First, on Friday evening, the National Institutes of Health issued guidance regarding research grants funded by the agency. This guidance indicates that as of today (Monday February 10th), indirect costs will be capped at 15% for all current and new grants at all institutions, regardless of what our federally negotiated rate might be. In response, today the MA Attorney General filed a lawsuit against NIH, which has been joined by another 21 states, asking a federal judge to bar the NIH from implementing this change.
Indirect costs are critical to the work we do as researchers . At UMass and universities and research centers across the country, indirect costs are used to cover expenses related to construction, operations and maintenance of our research facilities, research administration staff, lab safety and hazardous waste management, research IT and computing services, databases and library resources, and other infrastructure related expenditures. Importantly, the change in NIH’s indirect cost rate does not affect funds allocated for stipends, salaries of lab members paid off direct costs, or lab supplies.
NIH funding (and federal funding more broadly) has been critical to support the nation’s research ecosystem, and thousands of institutions, including our colleagues at research hospitals, are affected by this recent action. We are continuing to work with partner organizations such as the Association for Public & Land-Grant Universities and within the UMass system, to respond to this change. For the time being, PIs of active NIH grants should continue grant-supported activities necessary to meet their contractual obligations. We will share additional guidance with NIH supported PIs when we can.
For PIs that are preparing new grant proposals to NIH, we encourage you to continue with your plans to submit. We will be communicating with proposal developers and proposals reviewers with clear guidance on how to prepare budgets for those submissions. In short, we will continue to use our federally negotiated rate on all outgoing proposals.
The second issue we want to bring to your attention is informal communications we have received from colleagues indicating that federal agencies may place restrictions on requests for no-cost extensions. Based on this prospect, we are recommending that PIs plan to use their allocated research budgets within budget periods whenever possible. As more information on this topic becomes available, we will share what we learn with the campus community.
Finally, a number of questions concerning invoicing sponsors for research projects came up in the listening session. If you have questions about projects that require invoicing, please email them to vcre@umass.edu. We will provide additional guidance on this on a case-by-case basis or more broadly, if needed.
We want to reiterate the importance of communicating with us if you should receive stop-work orders, change-of-scope orders, or other messages from your funding agency. If PIs or staff receive communications about existing federal awards or programs, please share those with the Office of Post-Award Management (OPAM) (opam@umass.edu) and the Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement (vcre@umass.edu) so that we can assist you with making appropriate changes to your award, if needed
We know that these announcements continue to invoke anxiety and concern amongst the campus community. We want to reiterate what we shared in our listening session: despite these changes in federal policy and procedures, our commitment to our shared values and our mission as a research university remain unchanged.
Please continue to visit the university’s federal actions page and the R&E news site for more information about these and other updates.
Sincerely,
Mike Malone
Vice Chancellor for Research & Engagement
Laura Vandenberg
Associate Vice Chancellor for Research & Engagement
Vice Provost for Research