Straws in the Wind - Part 315

From the Yale Daily News: Long days in the nation’s capital are not uncommon for Yale President Maurie McInnis. When McInnis traveled to Washington, D.C., last month, “a primary topic of conversation” was the Financial Accountability in Research, or FAIR, model, she said, for which she was advocating to increase transparency in federal funding of research administrative costs. McInnis’ ongoing lobbying efforts have been a focus of her presidency since President Donald Trump took office. “I was there for 22 hours last week,” McInnis said in an interview on March 31. “Flew down late one night, had meetings all day and then flew back late that same night.”

During her trip, McInnis said she met with “a variety of senators and members of the House of Representatives.” McInnis added that she does not “usually like to say which lawmakers we meet with” and that the recent trip included meetings with lawmakers who were “generally receptive.” 

“The big topic on the table,” McInnis said, “relates to facilities and administrative costs, or the things that are sometimes called indirect costs.”

...Several organizations — including the Association of American Universities, on whose board of directors McInnis sits — came together to form a group to develop a new model in response to the cuts. The Joint Associations Group on Indirect Costs is made up by experts including former government officials and university administrators. The group developed the model and proposed FAIR as a replacement for the current reimbursement system that uses negotiated rates for individual universities.

The FAIR model splits research costs into three categories, separating the costs currently categorized as indirect into two buckets. One of those buckets would include costs specific to each research project, and the other would cover institution-wide operational costs necessary for research, according to an Association of American Universities webpage about the proposed model...

Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/articles/mcinnis-latest-lobbying-priority-was-a-new-research-funding-model.