Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Oregon State Says U.S. Government Shutdown is Costing them Millions


Just how costly are the effects of the U.S. Government shutdown on Oregon State University? $600,000 per day.

The university, which partners with a number of federal agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Defense as well as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and NASA, told the Corvallis Gazette-Times that each day the government stays shut, it costs the university more than half a million dollars in lost research funding.

Since the shutdown began Tuesday, “we’ve already spent $2.4 million on being idled,” Rick Spinrad, OSU’s vice-president for research, said Friday. OSU is engaged in government-funded research involving everything from forestry to fisheries health, climate change and homeland security. Last year, the university received $154 million from the federal government for research. “We get funding from probably about a dozen agencies and bureaus; every one of them is inactive (now). We have 1,000 research projects, and two-thirds of them are federally funded.”
Read the full story here.