New disrupted awards identified
We’ve done a major overhaul on our back-end which identified a number of additional grants that had been disrupted. We held these until we could adequately review them and they are now included in our most recent update. Of these, the majority are grants that had been frozen (n = 110) or reinstated (n = 151), but also 17 additional terminated awards and supplements.
Award totals and remaining value at time of disruption
We display the total remaining funds of currently disrupted awards on our NIH tracker page as a bottom-line measure of the impact of terminations and freezes. We previously calculated the amount remaining for each award by subtracting the current total amount outlaid from the current total amount obligated (corrected for any post-termination deobligations). This made sense for terminated grants, but now many of these grants have been reinstated and renewed and continue to accumulate obligations and outlays making this value change which didn’t seem right. We also previously did not include the value of all terminated supplements as these aren’t separated out in USAspending.org award data.
With this update, we now present the total obligated and outlaid amounts to their values at the time of the first disruption (e.g. termination or freeze) of a grant. We also include the value of supplements, pulled from RePORTER data, and subtract those values from their “parent awards” so that they are not double-counted in column sums.
The total value of terminated supplements is $138.32M which is about 1% of the total value of all disrupted awards and supplements of $14.53B.
The estimated amount unspent at the time of termination is $33.26M for supplements 1 and $7.53B for all disrupted awards and supplements.
If we exclude grants that have been restored to focus only on the remaining value of grants currently terminated or frozen, it’s $530.01M2.
Detailed methods
The NIH data include three new columns with financial data for awards and supplements that are calculated as follows.
obligated_at_disruption:
For supplements (i.e. rows that have a subgrant_id) this is the value from RePORTER.
For their ‘parent’ awards, we subtract any obligations that have happened since the grant was first disrupted from the current total obligated amount. Then, if a grant has any supplements that were also disrupted, we subtract their value because the total obligated value from USAspending.org includes all supplements and sub-projects and we want to avoid ‘double-counting’.
spent_at_disruption:
For supplements, we estimate this by assuming a constant rate of spending throughout the fiscal year and multiply the obligated_at_disruption by the fraction of the budget year passed before the supplement was terminated. Importantly, we treat all terminated supplements as having only one year because it is challenging to determine whether supplement ‘S1’ in year 2 of a grant is the second support year of supplement S1 or an entirely different supplement.
For ‘parent’ awards, we subtract any outlays since grant disruption from the current total outlaid amount from USAspending.org. Then, if a grant has supplements, we subtract the obligated_at_disruption of those supplements to avoid ‘double-counting’.
remaining_at_disruption:
This is simply obligated_at_disruption minus spent_at_disruption for all grants and supplements.
Footnotes
We estimate the amount remaining for supplements by assuming constant spending over the budget year. Many supplements appear to have been terminated after their budget years are over, so our estimate is that $0 is remaining. However, many supplements are multi-year and would have received additional obligations with renewals, but because of the difficulty of programatically determining whether, for example, supplement 01S1 and 02S2 are two years of the same supplement or two different supplements, we treat each terminated supplement as just a single year being terminated. Therefore, the amount remaining at time of termination is likely an underestimate for supplements.↩︎
This is the value we show under “Current loss from disrupted grants” on our NIH tracker page.↩︎