Excessive rules hampering scientific progress at NC research schools

It is fashionable to complain about bureaucracy, but the time it takes scientists and engineers in the academic sector to comply with increasing regulation and reporting requirements is eating away at the funds taxpayers intend for research.

This has been increasing steadily to the point I am spending up to a third of my time dealing with compliance. In fact, a National Science Board report in 2013 found that the average time a principle investigator responsible for directing the research spends on the broad spectrum of compliance issues is an astonishing 42 percent.

I am sure this is not what the taxpayers who fund most of our nation’s research intended. At the national level, the NSB report has made significant policy recommendations to alleviate this problem, and a bill, the Research and Development Efficiency Act to empower a working group to make recommendations, has passed the House.

This situation has arisen due to an unhappy confluence of federal and state requirements regarding human resource issues, environmental health and safety concerns, conflict of interest reporting and the endless cataloging of progress, often in redundant ways.

To be sure, a certain amount of regulation and oversight will always be needed to ensure appropriate progress, personnel safety, protection of animal and human rights and fairness in employment.

But the balance has tipped in favor of growing requirements whose cost-to-benefit ratio seems, at least in some cases, not to have been calculated. In the face of increasing regulation and the lack of commensurate increases in an overworked administrative staff, aggravated by state budget cuts, very often the burden of compliance has shifted to the principal investigators.

There are several things that could be done.

▪ First, at the state level, the human resources program needs to be customized for a research university both in hiring practice and in employee evaluation. Grant principal investigators must perform competitively on the national stage, without excessive restriction at the state level, because the U.S. government provides most research and development funding.

▪ Second, federal progress reporting requires the same material over and over again. It would seem sensible, in this era of information technology, to have a standard database that the investigator could periodically update so that the feds could draw on that material directly.

▪ Third, regulation and compliance – always accompanied by an honest cost-benefit analysis – could be targeted to where it is really needed. In general, research shows that when incentives between the regulatory and performing entities are aligned, progress can be made in removing unnecessary obstacles. One of these incentives must be making the federally funded R&D enterprise more cost effective.

Creeping bureaucracy saps the energy from the intended consequences of constructive and necessary legislation. A challenge for all is how to make taxpayer dollars go further by streamlining compliance and regulation in the government funded R&D sector. The problem is far too serious not to invest creative effort in solving it.

This story was originally published October 12, 2015 at 5:14 PM with the headline "Excessive rules hampering scientific progress at NC research schools."