To the UW Medicine Community:
UW President Ana Mari Cauce has announced measures to reduce the University’s financial risk and improve financial stability. In light of unknown federal funding actions and a budget shortfall in the state of Washington, it is necessary to implement safeguards at UW Medicine in order to sustain our mission into the future.
We have been instructed to implement the following measures effective immediately in the School of Medicine:
- All in-progress non-clinical recruitments and new non-clinical hiring requests, except for those deemed essential and approved by exception, must be paused.
- All food purchases and discretionary spending, such as spending on branded goods, must be curtailed.
- All non-core activities that do not directly support care delivery, instruction, research, and public service missions, including programs launched with one-time funding, must be reviewed and constrained.
- Detail on grant requirements and guidance on research pre-spending on federal grants and contracts will be shared with researchers via email.
- All non-essential existing service contracts must be renegotiated, focusing on scope critical to the University’s operations, or concluded.
- In alignment with our existing policy framework (e.g., APS 2.3), local software licenses that may be duplicative of central, enterprise licenses must be reviewed and consolidated with central ones over the next year.
- Reach out to central unit leadership to explore shared services, especially where there are vacancies on your teams that cover finance, information technology and human resources.
- Please review activities and identify areas to reduce expenses or gain efficiency.
And effective immediately across UW Medicine:
All planned travel or training that is not essential to operations must be cancelled. We recognize that travel may already have been purchased and that refunds may not be available. Travel may occur if any of the following are true:
- The travel has already been purchased, regardless of the source of funds.
- The travel was or will be paid for without using University funds.
- Grants and contract travel can continue as long as the grant is active.
- For outside seminar speakers invited to present at the University, if the travel has already been purchased, the speaker may attend.
We will be providing additional guidance for those working in the hospitals, clinics and Shared Services, as well as additional refinement for travel by faculty, staff and trainees in the School of Medicine environment as we implement these measures.
With the expiration of the current continuing resolution to fund the federal government on March 14, we continue to monitor U.S. congressional activity this week in coordination with our external affairs team. The UW is developing plans should there be a federal government shutdown and we will provide further updates as that information becomes available. We should anticipate that our response measures will continue to evolve over time as we navigate the ongoing uncertainty in federal funding.
I appreciate that these response measures may be difficult for many in our community and thank you for your continued support of each other. We will continue to advocate strongly for funding at the state and national levels as we all carry on with our important work.
Sincerely,
Timothy H. Dellit, MD (He, Him, His)
CEO, UW Medicine
Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and
Paul G. Ramsey Endowed Dean of the School of Medicine,
University of Washington