National Dialogue on Faculty and Administrative Burden in the conduct of Research: In 2005 and 2012, the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) survey of principal investigators (PIs) of federally sponsored research projects found that PIs spend, on average, 42% of their time on administrative tasks. This administrative workload is negatively affecting the conduct of science and is disproportionate to the accountability and transparency necessary to manage federal funding.

The National Science Board (NSB) March 10, 2014 report Reducing Investigators’ Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research confirmed that “a culture of overregulation has emerged around Federal research, which further increases their administrative workload, ” and universities may baulk at changes due to “institutional concerns about liability.”

The National Academies of Science also recently published a report entitled, Optimizing the Nation’s Investment in Academic Research: A New Regulatory Framework for the 21st Century, Part 1, that highlights the overregulation of federal research dollars, where “resources that should be going to education and research ..... are diverted to less productive activities.” This report concluded that “some of this duplication results from a lack of clear compliance standards.”