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The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requires federal service contractors to report their direct labor hours and amounts invoiced to the government. This mandate is intended to help federal agencies fulfill their annual requirement to submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) an inventory of activities performed by service contractors, in order to help determine whether agencies have the right balance of ...more »

AAU, COGR, and APLU recommend that OMB require all Federal agencies subject to OSTP’s 2013 policy memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” to harmonize the procedures by which extramural grantees submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts or final published documents and data to the agencies’ public access repositories. We believe that this harmonization process may most effectively ...more »

The grant period usually does not match with the term of a graduate student or a post-doc exactly. Therefore, if one allows institution to approve the budget re-allocation between graduate students and post-docs, instead of seeking approval from funding agency, that will make research go more smoothly based on the need of individual project.

The FAR requires semi-annual submission of Individual Subcontract Reports (ISRs) for all federal agencies, as well as Summary Subcontract Reports (SSRs) for DoD and NASA, and annual submission of SSRs for civilian agencies. In addition to the submissions required during performance of a covered contract, ISRs are required to be submitted within 30 days of contract completion. Amending the FAR, at a minimum, and the ...more »

Based on the lack of any perceptible value for the agencies or the public, we recommend that Congress repeal the mandate for reporting on executive compensation and that the FAR Council subsequently revise the relevant contract clauses. Doing so will save millions of dollars and liberate additional contractor and government resources to focus on what matters most—achieving the missions of the federal government and serving ...more »