funds cannot be transferred easily from item to 

 item. Equipment for federally funded research 

 projects can be included in the project budget. 

 But equipment funds are weighed in competition 

 with other needs such as salary and wages. When 

 the overall grant amount is reduced — as is fre- 

 quently the case because of shortage of funds — 

 equipment items as well as graduate assistant 

 support are often squeezed out. Moreover, major 

 items of equipment are often needed for entire 

 research departments or groups and not just for a 

 single project. Since they are often very expen- 

 sive, they cannot be justified by any one project. 

 Thus, the university departmental, institute, or 

 central laboratories, as such, often fall short of 

 their needs for essential equipment. Agency pro- 

 grams now seem to be needed that would respond 

 to broad university requirements for major re- 

 search equipment without subjecting those re- 

 quirements to direct competition with project 

 grant funds. 



Internal Versus External Research 



Many agencies support basic research both in 

 their own and in outside laboratories. Universities 

 do the majority of this outside work. The decision 

 to do the work inside or to select a university 

 proposal is a difficult one. Some agencies, such as 

 NIH and DOD, solve the problem administrative- 

 ly by establishing specific budgets or levels for 

 outside research. Others, using a single research 

 budget, select the best performer without regard 

 to the affiliation of the investigator. NSF, on the 

 other hand, supports only outside investigators 

 and almost exclusively those in universities. 

 Agencies usually do applied research in-house; 

 they spend only a small portion of their budgets in 

 universities for such work. Some agencies support 

 very little basic research in universities but main- 

 tain university affiliations in other ways. The Na- 

 tional Bureau of Standards, for example, uses 

 university people on its advisory and review 

 committees and is closely affiliated with a labora- 

 tory in a university (the Joint Institute for Labora- 

 tory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of 

 Colorado). 



Deciding where and how to do research is espe- 

 cially complex in agencies supporting the whole 

 range of research — basic, applied, and develop- 

 mental — with both inside and outside performers. 

 The Department of Agriculture is one example. 

 Besides its own laboratories, it has cooperative 

 ones with States (located most often in land-grant 

 universities). It supports work in industry and by 

 individual scientists doing both basic and applied 

 work. In addition, the Department is initiating a 

 competitive grants program for basic research. 



260 AGENCY SUPPORT OF BASIC RESEARCH IN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES 



DOD, ERDA, and NIH have similar problems 

 and apply a wide variety of management tech- 

 niques as they deal with universities in this com- 

 plex situation. 



Decisions to do work in or out of agency labo- 

 ratories may be influenced by the need to keep 

 agency personnel employed and laboratories util- 

 ized. When funds are short, therefore, outside 

 work is threatened. As agency budgets fluctuate, 

 this produces the stop-and-go funding phenome- 

 non that affects university work most directly. 

 Both agency and university officials regard it as 

 having an especially adverse impact on the con- 

 duct of basic research. 



Many large, costly, and complex Government- 

 owned and supported laboratories are operated 

 for ERDA by consortia of universities (see Chap- 

 ter 1). Some are on a campus, with faculty mem- 

 bers from several universities holding joint ap- 

 pointments in the laboratory and in a university. 

 The programs in the major accelerator laborato- 

 ries, where most of the Nation's high-energy 

 physics work is done, for instance, are carried out 

 by diverse visiting university groups as well as 

 permanent laboratory scientists and staff. On oc- 

 casion, NSF, DOD, NIH, and NASA also may 

 support the individual scientists who work in 

 these ERDA laboratories. The basic research is 

 determined by the nature of the laboratories and a 

 complicated set of decision processes. These in- 

 volve both agency and external university scien- 

 tists in a very cooperative but complex way. The 

 same composite mix of university and Federal 

 administrative and scientific personnel exists in 

 the NSF-funded FFRDC's in radio and observa- 

 tional astronomy and atmospheric research. 



Relevance 



In selecting projects for support, questions of 

 relevance are constantly applied. Although some 

 agencies apply a rigorous mission test of relev- 

 ance, other agencies accept proposals in discip- 

 lines considered related to the agency mission; 

 DOD has supported much work in pure mathe- 

 matics, for instance. NSF asks only the relevance 

 to progress in science. Agency laboratories often 

 require mission relevance for basic research and 

 seek relevance to applied problem solving. In 

 university work, mission relevance is required but 

 less critically applied. Under the Mansfield 

 amendment, DOD was required to deny support 

 for any work not demonstrably related to mission. 

 This same prohibition has been applied variously 

 by other agencies, allowing or encouraging them 



