The federal government is back in business, and researchers are returning to government buildings and labs shuttered during the 16-day federal shutdown that ended late Wednesday.
But the standoff, which cost the economy billions and disrupted research projects and education plans nationwide, is likely to have lingering effects on academe. It could be weeks before government workers get through the backlog of civil-rights complaints and tuition-assistance claims, and grant making could be delayed.
In Washington, academics flooded the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian museums, eager to resume their research after a two-week delay. Research rooms at the National Archives remained closed, “to give staff time to ensure the proper protection of holdings,” according to the agency’s Web site, but were scheduled to reopen on Friday.
Scientists who were locked out of government-run labs during the shutdown were back at work, along with thousands of furloughed employees of the U.S. Department of Education and the science agencies. Some branches of the military were again accepting claims for tuition assistance for active-duty service members, though the Marine Corps said it wouldn’t process any new applications until January 1, when the second fiscal quarter starts.
The Merchant Marine Academy reopened, with classes set to resume next week, after fall break.
Farther afield, in Antarctica, scientists whose work was suspended got word from the National Science Foundation that the summer research season was a go. James R. Collins, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research was disrupted by the shutdown, reported in an e-mail that “everyone is running around setting up their labs” and would “move onto the ship this afternoon. We feel like we’ve been at the end of a very long yo-yo down here,” he wrote.
Setback for Science
For the most part, academics whose work is financed by the federal government were able to continue their research during the shutdown. But scientists like Mr. Collins, who work out of government facilities, often alongside government employees, found closed buildings and furloughed colleagues.
For the first week of the shutdown, Jeff Mayse, a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins University who collaborates with scientists at the National Institute on Aging, couldn’t enter the government building where he studies how rats make decisions as they age. He spent the second week fixing a piece of equipment that had malfunctioned while he was gone.
Now, with nearly two weeks lost, he said he won’t know if any declines in his rats’ performance are attributable to aging or to the lapse in training.
“We’re happy to be back at work, but definitely our projects are suffering,” he said.
Susan Jarvi, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who was locked out of the Department of Agriculture lab where she is testing a vaccine for rat lungworm disease, is scrambling for money to pay for another month of rat care. Two years into the project, “we have too much invested in this study to let it go,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Any suggestions for funding welcome!”
Because a round of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health were due on October 5, when it was still closed, the NIH will have to set a new deadline. It must also reschedule review meetings and conferences, a process that will take “a few days,” according to an e-mail sent to researchers by Sally Rockey, deputy director for extramural research.
Carrie Wolinetz, president of United for Medical Research, an advocacy group that represents universities and other research organizations, said the grant backlog would most likely be greater due to the old deadline.
“There’s going to be, I suspect, a mad rush to submit grants because everyone has been sort of holding them in limbo,” she said. Harold E. Varmus, director of the National Cancer Institute, wrote in an e-mail to researchers that they should help alleviate the backlog in grants by participating in the peer-review process, though it may require them to cancel “longstanding plans.” Such participation may be the only way to avoid “a major crisis in grant making and program development,” he wrote.
Backlogs for Bureaucrats
At the Department of Education, thousands of employees were returning to a mountain of e-mails and voice messages and a backlog of work. The department continued to award student aid during the shutdown but suspended federal audits and investigations and did not process any new sexual-assault complaints. Its Office for Civil Rights receives about 9,000 complaints a year, according to Cameron French, a department spokesman.
Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, sent a message to employees on Thursday acknowledging that “these next few weeks won’t be easy.”
“I know that you’re coming back to even more work than you already had on your plate before the department had to shut down,” he wrote. “Projects are falling behind schedule. It may be hard to prioritize what needs to get done first.”
Asked how long it might take the department to work through the backlog of student complaints, and whether grant-making competitions could be delayed, Mr. French said he wasn’t “in a position to summarize what remains outstanding across the department today.”
One meeting the department will have to reschedule is the second session of its controversial “gainful employment” rule making. Negotiators were supposed to meet in Washington next week to discuss alternatives to the department’s language, but the meeting was postponed. The delay is yet another setback for the rule, which would link federal student aid to students’ ability to repay their loans. A court overturned an earlier version last year.
At the National Endowment for the Humanities, officials were rescheduling peer-review meetings in an effort to keep to the agency’s three-times-a-year grant-making schedule. Judy Havemann, director of communications, said the NEH was relieved that it could “begin to make promised payments to scholarly and other grantees who would normally have received them during the past two and a half weeks.” She said that while peer-review panels could be rescheduled, “some sessions cannot easily be reconvened in a period of limited resources.”
“We’ll be working long hours to make up for lost time,” wrote Brett Bobley, director of the agency’s Office of Digital Humanities, in an e-mail. “But we feel we owe it to our researchers to do everything we can to make this right.”
Andy Thomason and Jennifer Howard contributed to this article.
