Bureaucratic history:
Years ago Geoff Grant got NIH to accept the modular grant as a time
saver.  However, the bean counters wanted a threshold above which the beans
had to be described. $250,000 was the compromise.  (When that was put in
place, $250K would buy twice the research it will today!)

Bean counters will always be with us -- an occupational hazard!  This is
probably not the moment to try to get the threshold raised, but it might be
achieved in the next big round of "efficiencies" in reducing the sponsors'
administrative cost.

Chuck

At 12:18 PM 1/5/2005, you wrote:
>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")
>======================================================================

Chuck Chermside
804-320-5502
xxxxxx@verizon.net

======================================================================
 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")
======================================================================