On September 1st, Princeton University was officially welcomed as a member of the Federal Demonstration Partnership during its Phase VII launch.  

The FDP is a unique forum of federal agencies and funding recipients committed to testing innovative approaches and streamlining processes and systems for federally supported research and education.  The FDP is a program convened by the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) of the National Academies.  Its purpose is to reduce the administrative burdens associated with research grants and contracts.  Individuals from universities and nonprofits work collaboratively with federal agency officials to improve the national research enterprise.  These interactions take place during the FDP’s three yearly meetings as well as in the many collaborative working groups and task forces that meet separately to develop specific work products.

The FDP began as an experiment in 1986 between five federal agencies (National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, Department of Energy, and US Department of Agriculture), the Florida State University System and the University of Miami to test and evaluate a grant mechanism utilizing a standardized and simplified set of terms and conditions across all participating agencies. Over the past 30 years the FDP has evolved into an organization of 10 federal agencies and 154 research institutions dedicated to finding efficient and effective ways to support research by maximizing resources available for research and minimizing administrative costs. Major accomplishments of the FDP include the Faculty Workload Survey, cited by Congress and researchers, the FDP Expanded Clearinghouse, enabling pass-through entities to obtain and review all necessary subrecipient entity information in lieu of burdensome forms, and SciENcv, a cooperative project built by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) with input from an FDP working group.  The full history of the FDP can be found on their website.

Princeton's acceptance as a full member of the FDP supplements our current role as a participating institution in the FDP Expanded Clearinghouse.  

We look forward to working with university-based and federal agency colleagues to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of research administration processes, and decrease administrative burden at a national level.