Regarding administrative and clerical costs and the changes to A-21.
The Office of Management and Budget is about to issue a q&a on this
subject.  It will address circumstances where charging is allowable
such as on major projects or where the admin/clerical person is needed
for substantive project effort such as data collection, arrangements
for conferences, remote site projects.

This will not solve the problem of the traditional secretary who is
being paid from several single investigator awards--truly, the
revision was trying to put a stop to this.

Our advice to our faculty was to justify, justify, justify.  We believe
that if there is a line item in the proposal for these charges and it
is not specifically stricken in the resultant award, then the agency
has made the determination that the charge is valid.  We will also
monitor any budget adjustments under expanded authorities and will
go in to the agency for post-award approvals when we want to make
these charges and they were not in the proposal budget.  I stress
to our faculty that these folks should not be doing ROUTINE tasks
but should be doing project specific, technical, non-traditional
tasks.

The trickier question is that of what we will do with current awards
as of July 1.  I don't want to have to write to every agency for
approval to continue these charges.  It looks like there MAY be
some guidance coming on this such as the grandfathering in of
existing projects for the current BUDGET period only, but we'll
have to see if it really comes.

Jane Youngers
Director, Research and Project Administration
University of Rochester
xxxxxx@mvs.cc.rochester.edu