US-CMS Research Program Funding

Rationale

The US-CMS Research Program receives funding from both DOE and NSF. The DOE funds flow through a fin plan transfer to Fermilab, while the NSF funds come to UCLA in a multi-year cooperative agreement. In turn, Research Program funding to the collaborating US-CMS institutions is either via a purchase order from Fermilab or a subaward from UCLA.

The rationale for which funds go where has several considerations. First, US-CMS receives proportionally more NSF funds than there are NSF core-supported collaborators. 25-30% of the Research Program funds are from NSF, while 20% of US-CMS M&O-A PhDs have NSF core support. This makes it difficult to direct all NSF funds to NSF core-supported institutions, and furthermore the NSF approves directing NSF subawards to DOE core-supported institutions.

Another consideration is the overhead structure at the host institutions. Fermilab charges a pass-through rate of 1.5% of the first $500,000 on purchase orders to collaborating institutions. UCLA charges 55.4% of the first $25,000 on a given subaward, but there is 0% overhead for directing funds to any University of California campus. (UCLA and other UC campuses collect their overhead on the funds spent at that campus, but there is no additional overhead to direct the funds there.)

This overhead structure favors funding all UC campuses with NSF funds. This structure also favors using DOE funds on Fermilab purchase orders for relatively small funding amounts so that the overhead cost is 1.5% rather than 55.4%.

Another consideration is the practice of combining all subsystem NSF funding (including for Software and Computing) at a given institution in a single subaward. This practice itself is driven by the UCLA overhead structure. For this reason M&O funding to institutions already receiving large amounts of NSF S&C funding (mainly Tier-2 Centers) is with NSF funds, in that such M&O funding is essentially UCLA overhead-free to M&O as the overhead is already paid on the large S&C amount.

Other institutions that receive relatively large funding amounts receive their funding through NSF subawards in that 55.4% of the first $25,000 overhead is a smaller fraction of a large funding amount.

There are other institutions that receive NSF funds because they are strong traditional NSF core-funded institutions.

Fundamentally, the choice of which funds to use at a given institution is driven by considerations of the most effective use of the available funds.