National Academies Seeking Ways to Cut Red Tape in Research

As the Trump administration roils the research community with dramatic cuts, some science advocates see deregulation as a rare opportunity for constructive collaboration with the White House. Officials in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy have recently said they are looking for ideas on how to lighten the load.

“We cannot resign our research community and the laboratory and university staff who support them to die the death of a thousand ten-minute tasks,” said OSTP Director Michael Kratsios in a speech last month at the National Academy of Sciences.

Responding to the administration’s interest in deregulation, the National Academies formed a committee earlier this year that will suggest ways to reduce the administrative burden placed on researchers. Lynne Parker, principal deputy director of OSTP, participated in the panel’s kickoff meeting on May 21.

OSTP is looking at current requirements related to research and is eager to receive actionable and detailed recommendations from the committee to reduce administrative burden, said Parker. “I think a lot of well-intentioned actions or directives have sort of led to this pile-on effect, and so we need to figure out a pathway forward,” Parker said.

The Academies committee is seeking to complete its report quickly and is requesting outside input through a survey, which closes June 6. The committee also plans to hold its next open meeting on that day.

“This could be a game-changer for a time when many in the research community are feeling all sticks and no carrots,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt at the kickoff meeting. “This is a chance to actually deliver a win for them.”

McNutt encouraged the committee to develop practical solutions to minimize the amount of time that principal investigators have to spend on paperwork, such as by exploring the potential role of AI to speed up some administrative processes.

It remains unclear just how much time PIs spend on paperwork, McNutt said. Some estimates suggest that researchers spend more than 40% of their time on administrative tasks, but McNutt said she would not be surprised to see the amount of time that PIs spend writing and submitting proposals go up as funding for research goes down.

“There’s been something like a 170% increase in regulations on research in the past decade,” McNutt said, though she cautioned that much of the increase is due to heightened national security protections that the current administration may not wish to reduce.

One approach to reducing regulatory burden would be to standardize grant application and review procedures across agencies, said Matt Owens, director of the Council on Government Relations, at the Academies meeting. COGR, which represents a variety of academic research organizations, has already submitted 16 recommendations in response to a broad request for deregulation ideas issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget in April.

COGR has also proposed creating a central mechanism within OMB to streamline and harmonize research regulations, called the Research Policy Board, and creating an associate director position focused on the subject within OSTP.

“The reality is no one federal research agency can address the growing and incongruous body of research regulations and requirements,” Owens said. The National Academies has previously recommended establishing a Research Policy Board within OMB, which Congress authorized in the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 but was never implemented. This board could “serve as a primary policy forum for discussing ways to streamline and harmonize research regulations, and act as a central mechanism to this end,” Owens said.

COGR has also recommended that OSTP institute a “cross-agency initiative to develop a unified regulatory framework to govern aspects of federal research,” Owens said.

“Just imagine how much more efficient it would be if the federal government used this framework approach for regulation, say, on cybersecurity, or financial conflicts of interest, or research security risk rubrics. This unified federal regulatory framework, with OMB having the authority to ensure consistent implementation across the agencies, would foster efficiency in the federal government, and frankly, at the research institutions,” Owens added.

At the same time, COGR has warned that the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to changing the status quo in research policy has resulted in additional administrative burden.

“It is imperative that actions taken to deregulate research follow the Administrative Procedures Act to help ensure stakeholder input is considered so that final actions, and their timelines for implementation, are well-informed and achievable,” COGR wrote in its letter to OMB. “Recent actions by the administration and federal research agencies have added new duplicative and burdensome certification and financial reporting requirements for research grant recipients.”