Congress Poised to Pass Another Continuing Resolution
With a Friday deadline to pass a bill to keep the government operating, Congress appears poised to pass a continuing resolution funding the federal government through January 19. The bill funds the government for another month at Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 levels.
There is currently no deal in place offering relief from sequestration—which would require overall funding cuts from FY 2017. The Ad Hoc Group for Medical Research, of which the BPS is a member, issued a statement expressing concern about an earlier proposal of the continuing resolution that would have suspended sequestration for defense programs and not nondefense programs. The Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC), which BPS also belongs to, sent a letter to Congress urging members to complete the FY 2018 appropriations process and reach a bipartisan agreement that includes raising the budget cap for non-defense discretionary spending.
Graduate Students Tuition Waivers Spared in the Tax Bill
After a fierce lobbying effort by graduate students and others in higher education across the country and a considerable amount of press, Congress dropped the provision in the House version of the tax bill that would have made the value of tuition waivers taxable income. Graduate students will continue to be taxed on the salaries they receive for lab or teaching work, but not on the tuition discounts they receive.
Beyond the tuition waivers, as this Science article points out, the tax bill is a mixed bag for research and higher education.
NIH Makes Changes to its Next Generation Researchers Initiative
Just six months after scrapping a plan to cap funding per investigator to free up money for young investigators and replacing that plan with the Next Generation Researchers Initiative (NGRI), NIH is now making changes to the NGRI program. Through NGRI, NIH had planned to annually fund an additional 200 early career investigators and an additional 200 promising investigators with no more than 10 years of NIH funding. The targeted individuals would have scores in the top 25% of grant proposals but were previously below the payline.
It turns out that implementation was difficult, the messaging was off, and NIH received push back on setting a 10 year cutoff for support for eligibility. At the December 15 NIH Advisory Council to the Director meeting, NIH Deputy Director Larry Tabak announced that NGRI will be tweaked to target younger and at-risk investigators, defined as those that are at risk of losing all their funding, regardless of how long they have had NIH support. Tabak said NIH still hopes to award an additional 400 grants per year to this targeted group.
An NGRI working group is expected to release a report in June 2018 at which time, there will probably additional tweaks to the program.
Controversy Erupts over Banned words at the CDC
On December 15, the Washington Post reported that employees at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) had been banned from using certain words in budget documents for FY 2019. After an online frenzy of attention to the article, the CDC acting Director tweeted on Monday that there were no banned words; others at the agency stand by their initial report that they were instructed not to use certain words, including fetus, transgender, and evidence-based.
Agency officials are responsible for preparing the budget and accompanying justification for the annual budget proposal the president sends to Congress. These documents represent what the president wants to see funded in the upcoming year, and with every administration, reflects those priorities. These are the documents to which the potentially banned or discouraged language applied.
This Vox article provides a good look at this controversy, placing it in both a larger and historical context.
The Department of Energy Announces Reorganization
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced on December 15 that it was reorganizing its internal management structure. Instead of having an Under Secretary for Science and Energy, there will be two separate positions: Under Secretary of Science and Under Secretary of Energy. The Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator position will not change. This is a return to the department's structure prior to 2013.
The Under Secretary of Science, Paul Dabbar, will be responsible for DOE’s Office of Science as well as environmental cleanup programs. The Under Secretary of Energy, Mark Menezes, will be responsible for DOE’s energy policy activities and applied energy programs. A DOE release outlining the changes can be found here.
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