How is lack of summer salary in budget perceived by reviewers/program managers

[born_a_prof]

Long story short:I am writing a proposal, and the budget is getting blown up due to other more pressing needs, and i need to rein it in.
I am a new PI and have couple of months of summer salary for couple of summers from my startup grant.

1). So i could do without summer salary: Can I put down 0.2 months per year (or some similar ridiculous) number of summer salary without sowing doubts about my commitment to the proposed project ?

2). Is having summer salary of co-PI higher than mine suspicious ?

[arcturus]

This is very common in my field. You probably have to be careful about wording in your budget justification (to avoid the dreaded "cost-share" clause), but you might be able to indicate the availability of start-up funds in your current and pending section. I usually ask for 2-weeks (0.5 months) equivalent for summer salary to indicate that I am committed to the project, but don't worry too much about the fine details.

[research_prof]

This is a tricky issue and it really depends on how the panel will view that. I have seen proposals where PIs claimed very low summer salaries and the proposals got funded. I have also seen proposals that this did not work, the reviewers rejected them, and the low summer salaries were one of the major reasons since they were perceived as "no commitment on the end of the investigators". I would suggest unless your proposal is a planning grant of around $100K, try to claim some more summer salary at least for the lead PI.

[fizzycist]

I think for a new PI on a multi-investigator grant a small amount of summer salary would be viewed as fine to most reviewers. Many don't look closely at the budget regardless.

If it is a big grant and you already have a history of having a number of big grants then this stuff may be scrutinized more.

For single PI proposals my default is something like ~0.25 months for every $100k (e.g. 0.5 months/yr for a $200k/yr total budget).

[nonsensical]

If you are concerned, could you request summer salary for yourself and re-allocate that money to something else if the grant is awarded? Depending on the amount and the lines involved, you may need approval from the granting agency, but in my experience (to be fair, mostly with private foundations) has been that this is not difficult to obtain.