The NIH budget justification is required on all research grant applications requesting more than $250,000 per year for direct costs (exclusive of indirects on sub-contracts).  These justifications can often be tomes detailing personnel qualifications and proposed roles on the project, and the arguments for many other costs (why all the postdocs can't sleep on a single king size bed at the national meeting).  This section also often serves, indirectly, to justify a lot of the science proposed.  E.g. one can present a lot of feasibility info in the justification for a piece of equipment, or introduce a complex study design in a justification of patient and subject costs.

Under the original modular guidelines (applicable to budgets under $250K), the itemized budget and justification were replaced by a single page listing direct costs per year and a "narrative" that was supposed to include ONLY budgeted personnel info without salaries, sub-contracts (if any), and reasons why direct costs might differ between years.  I always viewed this as a place that simply shed some light on the budget so that reviewers could better judge the appropriateness of the overall request without getting bogged down in the details.

Well...somewhere along the line the title "Budget Justification Page" appeared at the top of the Modular Budget Format Page.   However, the word "justification" is never used in the instructions to describe the purpose of this page, even in the new 9/04 version of the PHS398.  I think NIH is confusing applicants and administrators when it implies that the requested budget is being justified here.

I have often advised applicants using modular guidelines to include in the research plan any comments they felt were essential to the defense of the project costs.  But it seems that many applications are going out with this extra justification on the modular page.  This violates the guidelines and penalizes people who use up some of their 25pp in the research plan for the same info.

Does anyone have a good way of approaching this?  And, digging deeper, does it make sense that a project costing less than $250K can get an adequate review with little or no budget justification when a project requiring $300K needs to justify every budgetary burp and blink?  Do you ever recommend going non-modular simply to get more space to explain the project?

Charlie Hathaway

======================================================================
 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
 subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================