As a subscriber to the listserv and a member of the NIH Committee on Modular
Grants, I brought the recent messages on Modular Grants and Just In time to the
attention of Dr. Ron Geller, who now heads the NIH Committee on Modular Grants,
and he asked that I send you his response, which appears below.
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Janet M. Cuca, PhD
Review Policy and Special Projects Officer
NIH AREA Coordinator (http://www.nih.gov/grants/funding/area.htm)
Office of Extramural Research (http://www.nih.gov/grants/oer.htm)
Office of the Director
phone:    301/435-2691
fax:        301/480-8443
e-mail:    xxxxxx@nih.gov

Hello, my name is Ron Geller and I now serve as the Chairman of the NIH
Committee on Modular Grants. I have been on the Committee since its
inception and have initiated the great majority of Modular Grant
solicitations at NIH to date as part of the extramural program in the
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. I'm pleased that more of you are
talking about the proposal and I would like to clarify some points
/questions that appeared. First let me say that our goal is to establish
standard NIH practices with respect to Modular Grants. To date, so few
Institutes have actually been involved to any great degree that we have
as much misinformation circulating that you do. So far there have bee 29
RFSa and 5 PAs soliciting Modular Grants. NHLBI has issued the bulk of
these followed by NIAID. We also will plan to use the first year of
implementation to adjust our practice taking into account comments from
all players, and that includes all of you. AT THIS TIME THE PROPOSAL
HAS NOT RECEIVED FINAL APPROVAL BY NIH. Now let me move to the
issues:
1. Need for detailed(categorical) budgets)- Early on NHLBI requested
categorical budgets routinely, BUT DOES NOT DO SO NOW. The NIH
proposal will NOT require detailed budgets before an award is issued.
There may be some specific cases where more budgetary information is
requested, but it will not be routine.
2. Your need for detailed budgets- It is correct that you will need some
information to determine TOTAL COSTS requested, but that means you
need the F&A exclusions only. New local procedures may be needed to
deal with this. Once an award is issued( it will be a single direct cost with
no categorical breakdown), you will then establish your accounts as you
would normally do.
3. The 25% rebudgeting rule--As part of the modular grant proposal, this
condition has been  removed.
4. Submission of the checklist- There are conflicting views about when this
should be submitted. As part of the NHLBI plan, the checklist was
requested "Just in Time" when we had a good idea of what awards were
to be made in RFAs. The NIH proposal now asks for it with the application
because we are now focusing the effort on investigator initiated
applications that we want to award as soon as possible. If we are to try to
reduce the cycle from submission to award from the current 9-12 months to
5-6 months, it was felt that having the checklist as early as possible will
help expedite awards. So thats why we included the checklist up front at
this time.
We are establishing a mail box(xxxxxx@nih.gov) to deal
specifically with the kind of issues you are all raising. We plan to discuss
Modular Grants at the SRA Meeting, the NCURA Meeting, and wherever
else it will be of benefit. We want to learn from your experience and hope
you can benefit from our attempt to shift to a more assistance like mode
than a contract mode as Charlie Hathaway has described . Feel free to
contact me directly if I can answer any other questions as they come up.
Ronald G. Geller, Ph.D.
Director, Division of Extramural Affairs
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
301-435-0260
xxxxxx@nih.gov