‘Nearly Unmanageable’ Research Regulations Tackled by New Academies Report

A committee convened by the National Academies recently produced 53 proposals to reduce the red tape surrounding federally funded research without sacrificing its integrity, security, or value.

The recommendations published last week are the result of an expedited effort to inform the Trump administration’s push to cut regulations and reduce federal funding for research.

“With federal research agencies facing billions of dollars in budget cuts and reductions in staffing, there is not only the opportunity but the necessity to optimize the nation’s investment in academic research by allocating more time and money to conducting research and reducing the time and money spent on administrative tasks,” the report states.

Science advocates, including leaders at the National Academies and groups such as COGR, an association of research institutions that advocates for research policy, have long called on Congress and the federal government to reduce the regulatory burden on researchers and research administrators by streamlining requirements across federal agencies, but the report finds that relatively little progress has been made and that regulations have continued to proliferate.

“This year, significant federal actions and policy changes, some of which have come quickly without sufficient implementation guidance and consideration of their effects on the scientific enterprise, have added administrative workloads and created uncertainty, especially for research universities,” the report states.

“There is a tremendous amount of regulation and policies that overlay on the conduct of science, and there is great concern that the excessive, uncoordinated, and sometimes duplicative or inconsistent policies are hampering progress in science,” Committee Chair Alan Leshner said during a report release webinar last week.

While the 120-page report recognizes the need for checks and balances to ensure federally funded research is conducted responsibly, Leshner noted in his introduction to the report that the growing list of federal requirements has created a “nearly unmanageable” workload for researchers, administrators, and research funders.

To reduce that workload, the report proposes several options that policymakers could pursue to centralize oversight of the research regulation landscape and increase coordination between agencies. The report cautions, however, that progress may be difficult to achieve given legislative barriers, a lack of trust between research agencies, and unwillingness by institutions to support change given the “the upset reform can cause.”

“There’s no way that what we are calling for can happen unless somebody is in charge, somebody makes it happen, and some individual or group provides the coordination among the over 20 agencies so that they are, in fact, working together,” Leshner said during the webinar.

The report proposes changes to grant proposal and management processes, research misconduct investigations, conflict of interest disclosures, research security requirements, export controls, cybersecurity standards, and the regulation of research involving biological agents, humans, and animals. Each proposal in the report is accompanied by a list of pros and cons that highlight potential barriers to implementation.

Resurrecting the Research Policy Board

One of the proposals outlined in the report is to create a Research Policy Board within the White House Office of Management and Budget that could coordinate research policies and requirements across federal agencies.

The push to create such a board – like many proposals in the report – is not new. The National Academies first proposed the Research Policy Board in 2016, and its creation was mandated by Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act of the same year, but the board never materialized.

The report notes that pursuing this option would require reauthorization from Congress, which could take a long time, and, as precedent has shown, does not guarantee the board’s creation. Additionally, the report notes that the federal government may not be enthusiastic about establishing an advisory board, and its power over federal agencies would be limited.

Another suggestion for more centralized oversight of research regulations is for OMB to create a permanent assistant director for institutional research coordination and community engagement. This non-political appointee would facilitate collaboration between OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and use the National Science and Technology Council to “institute harmonization,” the report says.

Yet another option would be to use the Federal Demonstration Partnership, a federation of federal agencies, research policy organizations, and academic institutions, to pilot new approaches to regulation in collaboration with research agencies. The report notes, however, that the success of this approach would hinge on the voluntary participation of the agencies, and a “willingness to change existing requirements in the interest of harmonization and burden reduction.”

Other recommendations in the report include creating a single federal research misconduct policy and a single two-stage pre-award process for grant applications to be used across all agencies. The report also encourages agencies to use technology, including AI-enabled tools and existing federal research management platforms, to “simplify the process of complying with regulations and requirements to the greatest extent possible.”

Actionable next steps

COGR President Matt Owens welcomed the committee’s recommendations (many of which echo COGR’s own proposals) in an online statement. In particular, Owens praised the actionable nature of the report.

“Remixed and remade songs often top the charts because they resonate, and creative new variations emerge. The report’s 53 options — presented with pros and cons for each – make the report decision-ready, teeing up policymakers to take action,” Owens said. He added that “Historically, reports such as these have too often collected dust on the shelf after minimal progress. If the administration and Congress are rightly interested in reducing regulatory burden and to promote scientific advancements, then they now have a clear roadmap for doing so efficiently and effectively.”

“What remains to be seen is whether federal policymakers will get behind the wheel, step on the gas, and accelerate through the finish line to fully deliver,” Owens said.