Comment from ROBERT KAPLAN

Proposed § 200.220 languages prohibits recipients will chill recipient’s ability and willingness to engage in support bilateral or multilateral collaborations, agreements, programs, or activities outside of the US. This is said to apply whether the funds are used directly, or whether they are used “indirectly,” the latter being a completely ill defined and hard-to-understand criterion. It specifically says that “The prohibition would apply regardless of whether Federal funds are used for direct programmatic activities, research, technical assistance, travel, or indirect costs allocable to such collaborations.” This is clearly an unwise and unworkable policy as it would seem to prohibit freedom of association, freedom of communication, and exchange of ideas, technologies and materials even for projects that fall outside of the scope of the federally funded project. Staff and faculty of research institutions are almost always partially funded through federal and other governmental support, and also through non-grant funds including student tuition, endowments and investment income, clinical income to the medical center, etc. They are not employees of the government nor is it possible for each of their activities, written statements, speeches, presentations, conference-organizing activities, and the like to fully and clearly attribute the activities to a federal research grant. Therefore this rule would seem an impermissible and impossible-to-predict restriction on activity that will have the effect of chilling action and presenting a very high burden of investigation, legal consultation, and the like on grant recipients. Finally science has benefitted immensely from international collaborations, not only for global health concerns such as pandemics but also for understanding epidemics in the US through comparative cross-national epidemiology studies. Thus the rule will chill an enormous fraction of the scientific enterprise, in addition to being highly inefficient in cases where new capabilities must be developed in-house because foreign collaboration will be prohibited or at least will entail a high investigative and legal burden on the scientist who wishes to enter into such collaboration.