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Research funding comes in two essential parts:

• Direct Costs cover the scientists, lab supplies, equipment, and travel needed to conduct groundbreaking studies.
• Facilities & Administrative (F&A) Costs support the backbone of research—keeping labs running, maintaining critical research facilities, and ensuring safety and compliance.

Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs refer to the infrastructure and operational costs necessary for an institution to support research. These costs are not easily linked to an individual research project. F&A costs are sometimes called indirect or overhead costs.

Examples of F&A costs include reimbursing for portions of:

• Space for research activities, including state-of-the-art research labs
• Compliance support (e.g., human subject protections, export control, research security)
• Personnel to support accounting and administration
• High-speed data processing
• Library resources
• IT services
• Utilities

F&A costs are research costs. Universities and the federal government have a long-standing and successful partnership that grew out of World War II. The federal government relies on universities to conduct research in the national interest. This includes research aimed at meeting specific national goals such as health and welfare, economic growth, and national defense. Performing research on behalf of federal agencies incurs a variety of expenses that would not otherwise exist for universities. Universities – not the federal government – assume the risk of building the necessary infrastructure to support this research in anticipation that their research faculty will successfully compete for federal research grants and thus the university will be reimbursed for a part of the associated infrastructure costs. To learn more about the importance of F&A funding, .

Breakthroughs made possible through federal funding have a life far beyond the lab where a discovery is made. The advances developed by university researchers are used by industry to make technological devices faster, more accurate and more safe. They are used by doctors to offer relief to patients and save lives. They are used by other researchers to make new, more game-changing breakthroughs possible. These scientific advances are the essential building blocks of modern life, allowing us to live longer, fuller and healthier lives.

Research labs at universities are not only developing treatments and advancing science, they are the training grounds for the next generation of researchers – the scientists who will one day accomplish what now feels out-of-reach, inconceivable feats like discovering a cure to cancer or eliminating food insecurity. Through federally funded research, these scientists have access to mentors at the top of their field, to technology that is so advanced it can accomplish tasks once thought impossible and to ideas and methods that will fuel their future discoveries.