If History Is Any Guide, End of Federal Shutdown Won’t Bring Quick Relief for College Researchers

Neal F. Lane didn’t mince words when he spoke at the 1996 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, in Baltimore. On the heels of a 21-day government shutdown, then the longest in U.S. history, the National Science Foundation’s director was reeling.

Funds for many continuing grants had run out. He expected funding gaps for renewals and delays in funding new awards. New programs could be pushed back significantly — perhaps six months to a year — or canceled. The shutdown, he said, had “demoralized our work force and destroyed any efficient timetable for our already pressured work.”

More than 20 years later, a stalemate between lawmakers and President Trump has drawn the current partial shutdown to a new record length, 25 days. It has major implications for research. The longer federal agencies stay dark, one provost told The Chronicle last week, the more grant applications will pile up, delaying groundbreaking science and cutting off the work that early-career scientists can do before they go up for tenure.

What will happen when government operations restart? History indicates that the road to normality will not be easy.

Thirty large postal containers stuffed with unopened mail and grant applications greeted NSF employees returning to work in 1996, The Chronicle reported at the time. At the Baltimore meeting, Lane described the 3,000 proposals for grants as an “internal blizzard.” Mail clerks and proposal-processing technicians worked 12-hour shifts to clear the backlog.

How long did Lane expect it would take to catch up? Possibly more than eight months, he said at the meeting. “There is simply no way to avoid some negative impact of a month’s shutdown. We will do everything we can to limit the impact, but we will not lower the review standards.”

The NSF wasn’t the only agency to struggle with a backlog after the shutdown ended. Wendy Baldwin told The Chronicle in 1996 that the National Institutes of Health, where she was director of extramural research, was “not out of the woods” when it reopened, even after the agency received more than $11.9 billion in funding, 5.7 percent more than what it got in the 1995 fiscal year.

At the time she said she expected it would require six to nine months before the agency could return to business as usual. There was a lot to catch up on. When the shutdown began, in December 1995, NIH employees could not process about 2,000 awards set to begin on February 1, The Chronicle reported.

‘The World’s Most Positive Outlook’

There were no extra bodies at the NSF to review applications, Lane said, and the workload weighed on its employees. The deputy director, Anne C. Petersen, said in a March 1996 address to the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology that staff members had been pushed to their limits.

“Some days, it is difficult to put a positive spin on things,” she said at the meeting. Only after reviewing the words of someone with “what must be the world’s most positive outlook ever,” she said, “somehow the budget battles and the shutdown looked a little less grim.”

Whose outlook was so positive? Someone who had accepted a grim fate and hoped the pain wouldn’t last. She quoted Anne Boleyn, a wife of Henry VIII, who reportedly said before her decapitation: “The executioner is, I hear, very expert, and my neck is very slender.”

To academics, the uncertainty of the shutdown rippled out over the course of the year, according to a 1996 report. Faculty members heard that proposal processing could take a year. Graduate students who needed support for the summer applied for jobs in case NSF grants would not be available, that report said.

It was enough to exhaust even top agency officials.

“Right now, Washington is frenetic and confusing on good days,” Lane said in Baltimore. “I do not share the adjectives used to describe the other days.”

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.