The partial government shutdown has reached its one-week mark, and some UCLA researchers said they are becoming increasingly worried about whether they and their peers will be able to sustain their scholarly work.
For instance, the shutdown has significantly limited student and faculty access to scientific data sponsored by the federal government, said Steven Clarke, a UCLA biochemistry professor.
After members of Congress failed to agree on and pass a budget bill by Oct. 1, most federal agencies shut down or halted their operations, including the maintenance of key databases that students and faculty rely on for their work such as PubMed and the U.S. Census Bureau site.
PubMed, for example, has stopped updating its website, cutting researchers off from possibly hundreds of new scientific articles published a day, said Benjamin Emert, a UCLA alumnus and researcher. Websites, like the U.S. Census Bureau’s site, have been shut down completely, cutting off access to demographics and other data used by professors and students for mapping analysis.
UCLA Professor Paul Ong, who had scheduled his urban planning class around a project that depends on census data, has had to reshuffle his entire class to accommodate for the shutdown website. His class’s project – creating local analysis reports for the Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, which was expecting their reports – was almost put on hold.
All of his presentations that had instructions on how to use data from the census website had to be redone. Ong said he will have to use alternative data sources that are not as timely or as appropriate for the project he had promised the department he would complete.
“This quarter so far has been very challenging. If (the shutdown) is prolonged about half the quarter, then we’re in deep trouble,” Ong said. “Not only do we have to make these sorts of adjustments which are less than ideal, but we are also left in the dark in terms of how to proceed over the next few weeks.”
Researchers across the country will also have to wait for an unknown period of time for new money to pay for supplies and salaries for assistants and post-doctoral researchers in their lab, said David Eisenberg, director of the UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics . Eisenberg was supposed to meet this month with peers to review about 20 grant proposals from around the country, but has now had to put these plans on hold.
“That whole (approval) process has been put off until who knows when, and that means those investigators are not going to receive their grants. Even the very best of them won’t receive grants in time,” he said.
Some faculty said the shutdown is the second major blow dealt by the government to researchers across the country. The first blow came at the beginning of the year, when federal sequester cuts decreased the amount of funds available to distribute to researchers, Eisenberg said.
“(Resesarchers) already know how it’s harder and harder to get funding and to get accepted,” Emert said.
Emert added that he is worried this overall decline in government support for research will deter young people from becoming scientists.
“We’re keeping our fingers crossed … A few days is not a problem, but the longer (the shutdown) is, the more you may be missing,” Clarke said. “We’re just hanging in there.”