Science Agencies Face Backlogs Following Record-long Shutdown
The Capitol Building at dawn.
Architect of the Capitol
President Donald Trump signed a bill to reopen the government Wednesday night, ending the longest federal shutdown in history. Federal agencies are set to reopen, allowing intramural research activities and extramural research awards to resume. The funding bill keeps the government open through the end of January, at which point another shutdown is possible.
Krystal Toups, the director for contracts and grants administration at COGR, said the organization is “hopeful that the reopening will largely mark a return to business as usual,” but that it anticipates agencies will take some time to clear backlogs of proposal reviews and grant-related requests.
The 44-day shutdown had notable effects on research funds at agencies and universities and on the federal science workforce. Science agencies furloughed most of their staff, halting additional disbursements of grant funding to universities and many internal research activities. Brian Stone, acting director of the National Science Foundation, issued a memo to staff on Thursday saying the agency would prioritize “restoring our capacity to make awards” over the next several days and anticipated taking “a few weeks” to resume reviews of pending solicitations, panels, and travel.
“We cannot recover the time missed during the lapse, which means we cannot conduct all the programs and activities that we had originally planned for FY 2026,” the memo adds.
The National Nuclear Security Administration furloughed staff for the first time in the agency’s history. Meanwhile, the Trump administration used more than $9 billion in research funds from the Department of Defense to continue paying military personnel through the shutdown.
The administration tried to permanently reduce the federal workforce during the shutdown, issuing hundreds of reduction-in-force notices to staff at the Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, and other agencies. The notices were blocked in court, and the funding bill that ended the shutdown also nullified any notices issued since the beginning of the shutdown and blocked any RIFs through the end of January.
The Department of Justice requested stays in multiple court cases related to university grant reinstatements, though it appears that most grants to Harvard University and the University of California system were restored before or during the shutdown.
Some universities, including Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, and North Carolina State University, told researchers a few weeks into the shutdown to limit nonessential spending, including travel and supplies. Georgia Tech told its faculty on Thursday that the school will lift its cost-saving measures starting Monday.
Before the shutdown ended, one researcher at NCSU, who requested anonymity because he feared retribution, said the university implemented the measures to ensure it could continue paying researchers and staff. Many graduate students and postdoctoral researchers receive their paychecks through federal funds, and the university was drawing on its cash reserves to pay them through the shutdown, he said.
The researcher added that federal reimbursements for research at his institution were “down to a fraction” because agencies were generally unable to release funds. NSF, a major funder of university research, said work could continue during the shutdown on any awards that still had funds available and did not need intervention from federal staff. However, most federal grants reimburse awardees, such as universities, after they spend their own funds. During the shutdown, those reimbursements required intervention from federal staff, who were generally unable to work.
The funding situation is complicated further for some grantees whose current allocation ended at the end of the fiscal year and was expected to be renewed on or after Oct. 1. “We don’t know if we have authorization to spend the money we had budgeted for the upcoming fiscal year,” said Luke Oeding, a researcher at Auburn University. “There are some limited options at the university to spend funds in anticipation of the new money coming in, however, that is a risky move if we don’t know what will happen with the grants after the government reopens, and we could end up spending money that we can’t get reimbursed.”
That uncertainty left the researchers in a “holding pattern” throughout the shutdown, Oeding added, unable to commit to things like providing graduate students with stipends during the summer term in 2026. The uncertainty has also held back his team’s progress, he said, because they are unsure if their current project will eventually receive funding or if they should be planning to work on something different.
The shutdown also prevented Oeding’s team from getting academic articles publicly released because they are pending review from the Air Force Research Lab, which is funding the work.
Even though the shutdown has ended, the NCSU researcher said, “it’s not like we’re done and back to normal, because grant reviews have not happened, new batches of funding have not been sent. The longer you wait, the bigger those cumulative effects get, and the harder they are to come back from.”
