No advisory committee meetings for the rest of the year. No review panels until November. And don’t call us just yet.
That’s the guidance to the research community from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which reopened yesterday after the 16-day government shutdown. A memo from NSF acting Director Cora Marrett (also see below) outlines a series of steps that the $7-billion-a-year agency will be taking to get back to business over the next several weeks.
“It will take time and extra effort to work through the backlog of activities,” Marrett writes. “It’s important for us … to focus on re-establishing core functions, such as receiving, reviewing and awarding/declining proposals, as well as oversight and management of existing awards.”
NSF is urging scientists not to contact their program officers until the agency has had time to catch up on the backlog generated by the shutdown and resume normal operations. To that end, Marrett’s memo asks staffers to “pre-emptively communicate expectations” with the research community and “refrain from responding to PI calls and emails.”
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