Researchers spend more than 40 percent of their research time complying with regulations.
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The rise of generative artificial intelligence and the Trump administration’s deregulation push make now the right time to streamline and reduce federal scientific research regulations, argues a report the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine published Wednesday.
“At a time when the scientific enterprise is under a lot of pressure—we don’t want to pretend that’s not true—this is also a wonderful opportunity to streamline the workload not only of researchers, but of institutions and other individuals,” Alan Leshner, chair of the NASEM committee that produced the report, said at a public briefing. “We would be foolish not to take advantage of the policy climate that favors deregulation and unburdening our scientific enterprise from unnecessary, duplicative and uncoordinated rules and regulations.”
The 125-page report, entitled “Simplifying Research Regulations and Policies: Optimizing American Science,” lays out a three-pronged framework to guide a cohesive national strategy toward implementing more economical regulations. Those prongs include harmonizing regulations and requirements across federal and state agencies and research institutions, ensuring that regulatory requirements match the risk related to the project, and using technology to make regulation-compliance processes more efficient.
From there, the report offers a menu of 53 potential options across all aspects of research compliance, including research security, misconduct and grant management, designed for interagency adoption.
It’s all part of an effort by the National Academies to seize this political moment and accomplish their long-standing goal of freeing scientists from the weight of often redundant, expensive and excessive regulations.
Currently, researchers whose work is supported by grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense spend more than 40 percent of their research time complying with each agency’s varying administrative and regulatory requirements, “wasting intellectual capacity and taxpayer dollars,” according to Federal Demonstration Partnership data cited in the report.
“There’s no question that regulation is necessary to ensure that the science we produce is of the best quality, the highest integrity and is conducted with full accountability and transparency to the American public,” said Leshner, who has previously held leadership positions at the NIH and the NSF. “Having said that, the current regulatory environment has grown to a point that it’s actually hampering innovation.”
Despite previous calls by the NASEM and other groups to reduce regulatory burdens on researchers, few of those plans have come to fruition. Instead, data from the Council on Government Relations (COGR) shows that 62 percent of the regulations and policies federal agencies adopted or changed since 1991 were issued from 2014 to 2024.
For example, both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare regulate animal research, but in some cases, their requirements conflict.
When a research project is subject to both agencies’ requirements, it can create “confusion, redundancy, and extra work,” the report says. “The natural result is for academic institutions to create additional requirements of their own to manage the complexity and risk of noncompliance stemming from regulatory complexity.”
‘An Urgency to This’
Complying with inconsistent or redundant regulations also costs a lot for universities, which are now facing significant cuts to federal research funding. In 2022, COGR estimated that institutions receiving more than $100 million in federal research funds spent an estimated $1.4 million a year to comply with the NIH’s Data Sharing and Management Policy while smaller institutions spend just over $1 million a year.
The burden of regulatory compliance can also further exacerbate research inequities.
“Typically, the more underresourced institutions—regional state institutions, minority-serving institutions, HBCUs and tribal colleges—may not have as large of a research infrastructure or staff to handle some of the regulations that filter down from the federal level,” said Emanuel Waddell, committee member and chair of the nanoengineering department at North Carolina A&T State University. “When the infrastructure isn’t there to answer questions, that burden falls on the researchers themselves to seek out answers, and it takes away time from pursuing intellectual curiosity.”
And with looming cuts to federal research budgets, including mass layoffs at the federal agencies that oversee research, members of the committee believe now is the time to reduce the cost of regulatory compliance if the United States wants to remain a competitive producer of scientific innovation.
“There’s an urgency to this. We really have to get this done. Think about how constrained budgets are—we have $37 trillion debt in this country and it continues to grow,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, a member of the committee and a professor and special adviser to the chancellor for science and policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “With relatively little cost, we can unlock a lot of money that is now being directed toward things which are not helpful and put that money toward doing research.”
But making it happen will be up to the federal government.
Matt Owens, president of COGR, urged federal policymakers in a statement Wednesday afternoon “to act this fall on the most actionable and timely of the options.”
“If the administration and Congress are rightly interested in reducing regulatory burden and to promote scientific advancements, then they now have a clear roadmap for doing so efficiently and effectively,” he wrote. “What remains to be seen is whether federal policymakers will get behind the wheel, step on the gas, and accelerate through the finish line to fully deliver.”
