By SHANNON O. WELLS
During his December report to the Senate Research Committee, Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research, explained a new concept called “forward funding” that was recently covered in a New York Times article.
The large federal funding agencies, including National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), are changing the way they push funding out, the article said, “in part to try to get all of their funding out before the end of appropriate fiscal years,” Rutenbar noted.
“The idea in forward funding is that (for example), I write a proposal for a million dollars — call it $200,000 a year for five years. NIH comes back and says, ‘We really like your proposal. We want to fund it, but we’re not going to fund a million dollars. We’re only going to fund $800,000. We’re not going to fund you $200,000 a year. Here’s all the money right now. Go away.’”
Agencies, he explained, don’t want to worry about funding multi-year grants as part of their budgets.
“They’ve already paid for you in this year’s budget,” he explained. “It clears the decks for them to decide what they want to do in the next year and the next year.”
Forward funding was among topics Rutenbar shared with the Senate Research Committee at its Dec. 19 meeting. Because of obligations with his new role as chair of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities’ Council on Research, it was the first committee meeting he was able to attend for a couple of months.
“My apologies,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been problematically absent.”
As he outlined the forward funding concept, Rutenbar recalled that several years ago there was advocacy for the approach in certain facets of U.S. research infrastructure.
“You know, like, ‘Just give me all the money,’ and in some sense reducing administrative burden to manage the money,” he said.
One downside is receiving only $800,000 of a $1 million request.
“The other is that if you’re going to give everybody all of their money in any given year, you’re going to be able to give (four or five times) fewer awards in any given year,” Rutenbar said. “And that could be a dramatically bad thing, especially for younger folks trying to get into the game with their first award. You could imagine a long-term path toward this being the way the federal funding agencies fund everybody.”
The transition, however, from “not doing this today and doing all of this tomorrow … could be wrenching.”
Although some forward funding is happening, perhaps in “some kind of in an attempt to get money pushed out rapidly,” it’s not happening everywhere, he noted, and that includes Pitt.
“Is it happening at some of our peers, especially our med school, health science, dominant peers? Yes. Is it happening unilaterally across all of the awards in those peers? No.
“We are talking about it. It’s not happening to us yet. I’ll let you know if it does,” Rutenbar said. “We just don’t know what to say about it. … I’m just sort of sensitizing people, and the fact that that was happening was a big enough deal that there’s actually a large New York Times article about it.”
Federal funding
Following months of uncertainty based on changes from the current administration during 2025 and a protracted government shutdown last fall, federal funding to research agencies remains flowing courtesy of a continuing Congressional resolution that continues through Jan. 30.
“The general vibe is that nobody wants to do another (resolution), but we’ll see,” he said. “A reminder, the federal government does not fund itself by passing one bill where all the money is, and the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ from the current administration was the continuing resolution to have things keep going on.”
The federal government funds 12 appropriations bills to run “all of the bits” of government, Rutenbar explained. “To date, right now, four of those bills have been passed: agriculture, legislative affairs — that’s the money that allows Congress to pay for itself — military construction and the Veterans Administration.”
He pointed out that “all of the science-y kind of stuff” and other federal funding researchers and faculty tend to care about, “that does not all live in one bill.” Rutenbar explained that agencies like NSF and NASA fall under the “Commerce, Science and Justice” umbrella, while “Labor, Health and Human Services Education,” or “Labor H” controls NIH funding.
“A whole bunch of bills have to pass in order for all of the federal funding agencies that we care about to be funded,” he said.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed in early December. “It has some important stuff in it (including) language that blocks the secretary of war, previously known as the secretary of defense, from unilaterally making changes to (indirect funding) on Department of Defense awards.”
Indirect costs are expenses for elements not directly involved in one specific research project but necessary to keep it going.
At Rutenbar’s request, Mike Holland, vice chancellor for science policy and research, elaborated that a Senate-based compromise means the secretary of war cannot change how indirects are calculated without a process of consulting with the research community.
Two goals defined in the defense authorization’s Section 230 include reducing the overall indirect cost rate for all applicable institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations. “They basically are saying, bring the top number down on this indirect cost rate,” while also calling for a model that “optimizes payment of legitimate and essential indirect costs.
“That’s sort of a nod to the FAIR (Financial Accountability in Research) model that has been developed,” Holland added. “They (also) recognize that this is not something you can snap your fingers and have everything come to the new state very quickly. They do basically say there has to be a clear and orderly transition period between our current state and whatever the future state is.
“We’ll take that in large measure as success in moving the debate from the arbitrary, ‘Cap everything at 15%,’” to essentially moving the administration toward the FAIR model. “However, there are a lot of details to be sorted out in how that shakes out. It’s movement, but it’s not the final answer.”
Following Holland’s clarifications, Rutenbar said that “on balance, it’s a good thing,” adding that “there is a lot of biotech side stuff in the NDAA, including some … guidance (or) asks for the DOD to look at some biotech side research capacities and other things that could be good for us.
“Pitt is actually quite big in military medicine, DOD side stuff,” he added. “So if there are research opportunities, funding opportunities that are opened up on the DOD side, it could be a win for us.”
Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. 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 Twitter and Facebook.