Billion dollar natural disasters

For Bloomberg, Rachael Dottle and Leslie Kaufman go with the combo stacked area chart and stacked bar chart on the top and bottom to show increased cost of billion dollar disasters and the counts over time. It looks like the sporadic tropical cyclones are causing the most damage.

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Scale of billions of dollars in Australia’s budget

To show the scale of tax cuts and Australia’s budget, ABC News takes the long, vertical unit chart approach, and the squares just keep coming. This is one of those scrollers that works best on mobile.

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Writing Budget Justifications

A Budget Justification is the narrative that accompanies your budget and can be up to five pages in length. This is where investigators validate and explain the dollar amounts they requested in their line-item budget. Justifications explain pay rates, duties of personnel, time commitments, materials and supplies, and other things necessary to complete the proposed work.

While writing your Budget Justification, you should ensure you are answering these questions:

  1. Why are the requested funds needed?
  2. How does each item in the budget help meet the proposed deliverables?
  3. How were these requested funds estimated?

As always when preparing a proposal, it’s important to follow guidance in the PAPPG. In addition to the details provided there, here are three general pieces of advice to write the best Budget Justification:

  1. Use Parallel Formatting with the Budget template

You can easily organize and format your Budget Justification using the same letter and number system used in the budget template. This also helps your Program Officer locate specific items and amounts.

Using Senior Personnel as an example, your budget template will look something like this:

Then, your budget justification should follow this order:

A. Senior Personnel

  1. Pomona Sprout- Principal Investigator, # months work/year, list specific responsibilities and explain how she arrived at this calculation. Year 1 $$$$, Year 2 $$$$, Year 3 $$$$, Year 4 $$$$
  2. Indiana Jones- Co-Principal Investigator, # months work/year, list specific responsibilities and explain how he arrived at this calculation. Year 1 $$$$, Year 2 $$$$, Year 3 $$$$, Year 4 $$$$
  3. Budgeting Salaries: Time and Rates

For all personnel, show what amounts you are asking for and state how you calculated those salary amounts. If you are not requesting salary, you can  provide a brief explanation of why. Give a monthly breakdown and include any fringe rates. If you are requesting more than two months of salary for any senior personnel, provide clear rationale. Some commonly seen exemptions include that the person has a soft money position or that the project scope requires buying out of teaching time (as might be the case at an undergraduate institution). Also keep in mind that the two-months of salary for an individual is counted across all NSF awards that person is associated with.

  1. Avoid common mistakes in Section G. Other Direct Costs

Section G is often where confusion happens. The best way to avoid confusion is to start in the PAPPG, which clearly defines which costs should live in lines G1-G6. Some key points to keep in mind:

  • Section G.1 (Materials and Supplies): Materials and Supplies that will be used by students or trainees listed under Participant Support Costs can be (but are not required to be) included in G.1, allowing for the application of indirect costs.
  • Section G.3 (Consultant Services)If you are using the consultant category, the PAPPG requires information about each individual’s expertise, primary organizational affiliation, normal daily compensation rate, and number of days of expected service. You can include consultant travel cost, but will need to justify them.
  • Section G.5 (Subawards): For each subaward, a budget and budget narrative need to be prepared and submitted. Please make sure that the subaward budgets list the subawardee institution and PI (and not the information of the lead institution and PI again).
  • Section G.6 (Other Direct Costs – Other): This is a catch-all category that will always attract scrutiny, so especially for this section be sure to be explicit about what you’re requesting, why, and how much it will cost.
  • Graduate student tuition goes in G.6. Other.
  • Double check the indirect-cost (overhead) rates

If most of your work is off-campus, check with your Authorized Organizational Representative about whether the off-campus indirect cost rate applies. Different institutions have different policies on when the off-campus rate is appropriate and sometimes Sponsored Research Offices simply assume that all work is on-campus.  Because the off-campus rate is typically about half of the on-campus rate, it will make a big difference in your requested budget.

In Conclusion

Justify everything. Assume nothing. If necessary, clarify the NSF budget guidelines with your Authorized Organizational Representative prior to submitting a proposal. This is especially important for rare or unusual expenditures, such as foreign subawards or consultancies or salary requests beyond two months for any senior personnel. It’s also important for normal expenditures like travel.

For example, don’t just write, “I need $8,000 for international travel to go to two meetings in Europe.” Use an airfare estimator and show the breakdown of costs.

Again, make sure your Program Officer will be able to understand how you came up with the total number you’re requesting in each category. There’s no harm in adding a table to show calculations. And this may seem obvious, but make sure the numbers in the budget justification match the numbers in the budget.

Federal budget scaled to per person dollars

For The Upshot, Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui scaled down the federal budget to something more relatable:

To better understand how federal spending has changed since Mr. Trump has taken office, we looked at the actual budget amounts for the 2020 fiscal year. We divided them by the U.S. population and sized the numbers proportionally to make their scale easier to visualize. Then we compared the numbers to the actual budget for the 2016 fiscal year, adjusting for inflation and population changes.

Federal budget visualizations usually aim to show big dollar values going to many different departments. You look at the breakdowns, and you can’t help but think, “That’s a lot of money.” For most of us, it’s hard to imagine billions of dollars, because the scale is so far beyond our own experiences.

So it’s interesting that this piece goes the other direction and scales everything down to match the values to something more familiar. The font size of each value also scales accordingly, which I think in the end is what you end up focusing on.

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Searchable budget proposal and the 10-year change

The administration released a budget proposal yesterday, which as you’d expect contains some big shifts. The New York Times calculated “the changes over 10 years, compared with projected spending under current law” and made the numbers available in a searchable table.

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Shifting national budget

The Washington Post looks at the shifting national budget over the past 40 years. Be sure to keep scrolling past the first overall to see the funding for departments separately. The consistent vertical scale works well.

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The dark side of running a lab

Image courtesy of Ludie Cochrane

Image courtesy of Ludie Cochrane

A lucky few scientists make it through graduate school and a post-doctoral fellowship AND manage to secure a position running their own lab. Once they begin the day-to-day grind of operating a research enterprise they often realize there’s way less time for science and more administrative tasks to do. This administrative burden can be a drain on creativity and scientific productivity. The National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a request for information (RFI) to learn what aspects of administration are affecting scientists at work, and hear their suggestions for change. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), a coalition of many scientific societies, administered a survey sent out to all 26 member societies to collect the data for NSF. The answers they received painted a picture of what it’s like to be a scientific investigator.

Parts of the data are not THAT new. A large percentage of respondents ranked grant related activities as their largest administrative burden. In this time of tight funding, it’s not surprising scientists are spending more time writing more grants for different funders. However, I was surprised to read that many had complaints about their administrative staff regarding grant submission. The staff’s inexperience with the scientific enterprise was a serious handicap to many researchers and essentially created even more work for the scientists. Is this a problem that is fixed by more training for administrators? Or by moving people with scientific training into those roles?

Another major area of burden and complaint was animal care regulations and oversight. While I personally haven’t worked with animals needing special protections and protocols, I’ve heard about the headaches it can cause. No scientist wants to harm their animals or violate regulations but when a tiny revision (even a spelling change) can take months to be approved it puts scientists in a position where they violate their approved protocol just to prevent a huge disruption in their experiments. Many suggested streamlining the review process and having certain changes fast-tracked with an approved protocol. They also suggested having certain approved protocols available to be cited instead of rewritten by each researcher performing that particular protocol.

A last area of concern is personnel management. It’s often overlooked that scientists become managers without any training on how to hire, manage the budget, and deal with administrative issues. Many requested personnel management training as part of starting their labs. There were complaints surrounding the administrative personnel in this area as well, in that HR agents were ill-equipped for the hiring needs and complexities of staffing research labs.

So what will the outcome of this survey be? Many of the issues raised are institution specific and I highly doubt many administrators of public research institutions are reading up on this surveys results. Some of the issues require collaboration between funding agencies to simplify requirements and generate a common system. Based on my current experience working for the man (National Institutes of Health, NIH) I think the likelihood of that happening is extremely low. NIH has certain reporting requirements and systems and unless outside agencies are willing to just adopt what they do, it’s doubtful that they will come up with a new simplified system.

It’s interesting to see what burdens scientists face in operating their own labs. Will this just be one of many reports presented, but not used to improve the system?