The shutdown and Berkeley: Q&A with Vice Chancellor Randy Katz

As the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history heads into a second month, Berkeley News talked with Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz , professor of electrical engineering and computer science, about how the standoff over President Trump's border wall is affecting UC Berkeley's research enterprise so far, and about what will happen if the shutdown continues much longer. Which funders of UC Berkeley research are shut down and which are open? The 2019 budgets for some agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, were approved by Congress before the shutdown and are not affected. Government agencies are funded by a series of separate bills that work their way through Congress, and some of them got through the gate before the president decided to shut the government down. Technically, the shutdown occurred as a consequence of the president not signing the bills that fund those agencies through to the end of September 2019. But other large funders of UC Berkeley research had to close, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the National Endowment for the Humanities/National Endowment for the Arts (NEH/NEA), the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture. Among these agencies, Berkeley receives about $110 million dollars in funding from NSF and $46 million in funding from NASA. This is part of a total level of federal funding of about $422 million per year. Is the campus feeling the effects?