By Elizabeth Stulberg, Lewis-Burke Associates
At the beginning of the new fiscal year, Wednesday, October 1, with no new funding bills or continuing resolution passed by Congress, many agencies within the federal government suspended their services. This is known as a government shutdown. It will end when Congress passes funding bills that reopen the currently-shuttered federal agencies.
The services available during a shutdown depend on where agencies receive funding from and whether that agency’s services are considered essential. For example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) receives its funding from Congress in the form of annual appropriations, and so without those appropriations, it is not allowed to continue operating. On the other hand, certain functions at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) receive funding from user fees, and so those funded services may continue. Air traffic controllers, whose work is considered essential, are also required to work, though they are not paid for the duration of the shutdown.
Certain research and funding-related services have already been suspended. Program managers, for example, will be unavailable, and no new funding opportunities will be announced. However, deadlines posted before the shutdown began will likely remain in effect, and proposals should be submitted via the appropriate portals.
The end of the fiscal year on September 30 also brought concerns of expiring funding. Indeed, some programs, including the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and certain others at USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) have funding that must be disbursed before the end of the fiscal year. Although the NIFA Grant Funding dashboard has not been updated with disbursements for those programs, USDA has reported unfreezing and distributing those funds in advance of the end of the fiscal year. The flagship competitive grants program at NIFA, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), by contrast, has two-year funding – money appropriated for FY 2025 can be spent in FY 2025 or FY 2026, giving the agency an additional year to make awards.
USDA NIFA was not the only funding agency slow to spend its FY 2025 dollars. Concerns about funding from other agencies also grew towards the end of the fiscal year, but each agency has its own rules for when its funding expires. For example, the Department of Energy (DOE) can use its research funds until they are expended, with no expiration date. By contrast, NSF’s FY 2025 funding expires at the end of the fiscal year, but the money remains available if it has been “obligated,” which means that program managers have designated where the funds will go, for example to a given program, even if proposals have not yet been solicited.
Lewis-Burke will continue to monitor both the status of the government shutdown and the rollout of federal research dollars. Please watch this space for updates, as they become available.
