Today we have another update to frozen grants (follow-up to the last update). There are a few parts to this, but the result is a more reliable and complete list of frozen grants and removal of some grants inappropriately marked as ‘reinstated’.
Starting today, we added University of Pennyslvania to our list of institutions that had been targeted. Funding freezes at Penn began in March and ended in July.
We now distinguish between “full freezes” where all grants at an institution are known to be frozen (i.e. Columbia and Brown), and “partial freezes”. When there is a “full freeze” our rules for detecting a frozen grant are a bit relaxed—we don’t require $0 outlays the entire targeting period, rather all grants at that institution are considered frozen after targeting begins and are considered “unfrozen” if they receive outlays, even if this is before targeting of the institution ends. This change is important, since it appears that some grants at Columbia recieved outlays before the university officially capitulated.
We also made some changes to better handle grants that move from targeted institutions during freezes and to handle periods with “expected” $0 outlays due to a grant being nearly or fully spent and near its project end date.
The result is the addition of 64 “possibly unfrozen”, 160 “unfrozen” grants, and 153 “frozen” grants and the removal of 44 “possibly reinstated” and 10 “frozen” grants. The 44 “possibly reinstated” are all currently at Brown and Columbia, and were incorrectly marked “possibly reinstated” for a while now due to a mistake on our part as these grants were never terminated, only marked as frozen under the earliest definition we used and are no longer detected as frozen. Six of the eight “frozen” grants removed are at Duke and are removed due to an incorrect freeze start date of April being used prior to this update. The 153 “frozen” grants added are also all at Duke and weren’t showing up previously due to a bug.
We’ve set aside the full list grants that were removed by these changes to investigate further and confirm what really happened to them. If you have a grant that had frozen funds, and it’s not in our data, please contact us at info@grant-witness.us!