We have updated our methods for estimating NIH award size and outlays in the Grant Watch database. The new approach provides better estimates of actual outlays and remaining funds for terminated grant supplements and subawards as NIH provides official numbers for a smaller fraction of grants. It reduces our overall estimates of total value of awards and remaining/lost funds by approximately 20% compared to previous values.
We detail our new approach in the methods section of the home page:
Estimating NIH grant budgets
Determining the overall grant size, total funds outlaid, and total unspent funds for each terminated NIH grant is a complex process due to NIH’s system of separate tracking of grant years, supplements, and subawards, all under a single Federal Award Identification Number (FAIN). For top-level or “parent” grants, we use data from USAspending.gov, which reports to total obligated funds for the full multi-year grant, and the total outlays. USAspending.gov data is typically 1-2 months behind current data, and at the time of termination, will not include funds spent for close-out. For supplements and subawards, USAspending.gov does not break out budgets. For a subset of supplements and subawards, we use totals and outlays as reported by HHS in the PDF of terminated grants posted to their website. As only a subset of terminated grants are included in that file, for remaining supplements and subawards we use the total supplement/subaward budget for the current grant year as listed in NIH RePORTER, and estimate the total outlays based on the percentage of the grant year that has elapsed. This assumes a constant rate of spending, and under-estimates the total budget and outlays for multi-year supplements and subawards. For all awards and data source, we calculate remaining unspent funds as the difference between the total budget and total outlays.
Previously, in the absence of official data on outlays for terminated supplements and subawards, we linked directly to USAspending.gov data. This gave the impression of larger award sizes and outlays, as this data does not break out supplements. This discrepancy has grown in the past three weeks as NIH has reported a larger and larger fraction of awards only through the RePORTER website with no subaward spending data, and a much larger fraction of these awards have been supplements (largely supplements to promote diversity). Updating our method fixes this widening gap.