Thousands of scientists returned to work this week following the longest government shutdown in US history. Several major science agencies were subject to the shutdown, which forced them to suspend all nonessential functions for a period that ultimately lasted 35 days. On 25 January, President Trump and Congress finally reached an agreement to fund the government for three weeks while they seek a resolution to their impasse over funding a wall along the US–Mexico border.
Agencies have now begun the long task of restarting research activities, making missed payments, rescheduling canceled meetings, and reviewing a backlog of grant applications, among other matters requiring attention. Moreover, they must do so amid a cloud of uncertainty about what will happen when their current stopgap funding expires on 15 February.
Clearing the backlog of work could take months, and some reverberations from the shutdown could be felt for far longer.
Workforce impacts are the foremost concern
The agencies’ most immediate priority is providing back pay to their employees, both “excepted” employees who continued to work during the shutdown and the large numbers of furloughed employees who were forbidden from performing any work.
Roughly 90% of federal employees at NASA, NSF, and NIST were furloughed. Meanwhile, about half the employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration worked without pay. Most of them work within the National Weather Service, whose operations were deemed essential to protecting life and property.
How many contractors were sidelined by the shutdown and under what circumstances they will receive compensation is less clear. Although Congress has mandated that civil servants will receive back pay, no such assurance has been made for contractors. More than 30 Democratic senators have cosponsored legislation that would provide back pay to low-wage contractors, but the proposal has yet to be approved.
In general, contractors were able to continue working with pay during the shutdown if their activities had been forward-funded and if they did not require access to federal facilities or input from program managers in the near term. That enabled major research centers such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NSF’s astronomical observatories to stay open.
The status of contractor pay was a major concern expressed at a 29 January town hall meeting with NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. He acknowledged that some contractors would not be eligible for back pay and that some employees had left the agency because of the shutdown, though he said there has not been a “mass exodus.” He also stressed it will take a substantial amount of time for NASA to get back up to speed. “It is not a one-for-one delay. One day of shutdown does not equal one day of getting back into business,” he said.
Shutdown was set to spread far wider
The end of the shutdown came just in time for some science programs. The Universities Space Research Association, which works with NASA and other agencies, was approaching a “tipping point” near the end of January, says USRA senior vice president for science Nicholas White. On the day the shutdown ended, it had just begun to furlough workers at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and those associated with the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, an airborne telescope that was grounded during the shutdown.
Adding to the financial crunch, USRA had offered no-interest loans to NASA postdoctoral fellows whose program ran out of money in mid-January. White says NASA has committed to reimburse USRA, which administers the postdoc program.
Many contractor-operated research facilities supported by NSF were also close to running out of funding. NSF estimated that had the shutdown stretched well into February, those facilities would have had to halt experiments, turn off instruments, and go into “caretaker” status.
Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, says that about 90% of its workers would have been furloughed had the shutdown extended past 20 February, and only a few activities deemed essential by NSF would have been allowed to continue. In particular, scientists using the Very Long Baseline Array would have still provided data to the Department of Defense about subtle variations in Earth’s rotation, and NSF would not have furloughed local workers at its telescopes in Chile, because it would have risked incurring steep fines under Chilean law.
Beasley stressed the dangers associated with potentially driving away observatory workers. “It takes us a long time to create situations in which we can get these highly trained people working in these remote observatories,” he says. “Our ability to backfill and reassemble the observatory staff after a couple months of shutdown and those people running off and getting other jobs [would] take us years to recover from.”
Large backlogs loom
Agencies have resumed disbursing funds, though they will face choices on what to prioritize.
NSF director France Córdova said in a statement the agency will not be able to conduct “business as usual” because it is operating with stopgap spending. “We will start with the most pressing of issues, including processing the backlog of awards to universities and small businesses, rescheduling merit review panels that were cancelled, funding facilities and renewing oversight of those facilities, and funding graduate student and postdoctoral fellowships,” she explained.
NSF had to cancel more than 100 grant review panels that were scheduled for January and that together were set to review around 2000 proposals. At least 250 postdoctoral fellows stopped receiving stipends from NSF during the shutdown. Although the agency’s flagship graduate research fellowship program was unaffected because universities paid fellows using previously disbursed funds, NSF had to delay its review of the 13 000 applications it received for next year’s cohort.
Agencies with large intramural research programs will also be delayed in getting their experiments back up and running. Carl Williams, the acting director of NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory, says that restarting laboratories with sophisticated equipment such as clean rooms is time-consuming. Williams also noted the shutdown delayed NIST’s work to establish a Quantum Economic Development Consortium as part of the recently launched National Quantum Initiative.
Lawmakers look to stave off second shutdown
Congressional leaders met on 30 January to formally begin negotiations on a compromise border-security package. Whether an agreement can be crafted that will satisfy all parties remains to be seen. President Trump is still insisting on a substantial down payment for a new border wall; Democratic leaders have remained adamantly opposed to Trump’s proposals. However, Congress seems unwilling to allow another shutdown to occur.
Regardless of what happens between now and 15 February, the shutdown has already thrown a wrench into the budget process for the upcoming fiscal year. The president’s budget request is typically released in early February, but this year it will almost certainly be pushed back considerably. The White House Office of Management and Budget, which plays a central role in finalizing agencies’ proposed budgets, had most of its workforce furloughed during the shutdown.
Research organizations have urged the White House and Congress to quickly wrap up the negotiations. Peter McPherson, the president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, said in a statement: “Although three weeks of funding is better than no funding at all, the US research enterprise does not operate anywhere close to full strength when agencies are only guaranteed to be open three weeks at a time.”
This article is adapted from a 31 January post on FYI, which reports on federal science policy with a focus on the physical sciences. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.
