Nearly all academic researchers in the sciences rely on outside grants in order to pay salaries, buy their equipment, and run their experiments. Those grants end up powerfully shaping the academic sciences. By some estimates, many top researchers spend 50 percent of their time writing grants.
Interdisciplinary research is less likely to get funding, meaning critical kinds of research don’t get done. And scientists argue that the constant fighting for funding undermines good work by encouraging researchers to overpromise and engage in questionable practices, overincentivizing publication in top journals, disincentivizing replications of existing work, and stifling creativity and intellectual risk-taking.
A new biomedical research institute, called the Arc Institute, announced on Wednesday as a nonprofit in collaboration between Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco and funded by some of the biggest names in tech… Arc is “an institutional experiment in how science is conducted and funded,” Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and one of the Institute’s funders, told me. Researchers get eight-year grants to do whatever they want, instead of three-year grants tied to a specific project…
That was from an excellent article, “Can a new approach to funding scientific research unlock innovation?” Last year, Collison funded Fast Grants in coordination with GMU economist Tyler Cowen to accelerate COVID-19 solutions by giving grants within 48 hours. They moved $50 million to date, which included funding trails for the therapeutic fluvoxamine.
The article states that in 1970, the percent of NIH grant applications approved was 35-40% falling to just 20% today. That means its twice as hard to get grants, and incentivizes putting more time into proposal writing. Perhaps the incentives create worse proposal ideas, as studies found that there is little correlation between NIH proposal scoring and research citation.
This whole concept of changing how research is done — from project-based to researcher-based — has obvious correlations to what needs to happen in DoD, moving the budget from narrow program-based line items to portfolios centered around the performing organizations. This in turn provides the institutional environment to dramatically improve contracting, from 100+ page RFPs to formal relational contracts.
The Department of Defense desperately needs budget reform.
Of course, this process doesn’t work for everything. Certain major platforms like aircraft carriers are probably suited (at least in part) to program budgeting. But that’s also because the Navy has so many decades of building aircraft carriers. Program budgeting works for things you already know how to do, and can thus specify performance, cost, and schedule. Where complex RDT&E efforts cannot be pre-specified, it is best not to rely on articulated data that any third-party can verify, but instead rely on a social process that can take into account intangibles.
The system “doesn’t empirically seem to enable people to pursue what they themselves think is their best idea,” Collison said.
The previous statement, made about NIH researchers, is perhaps not true about certain DoD research organizations like DARPA, but is certainly true about DoD acquisition organizations responsible for scaling research into the field.
This question of when “freedom” over decisions should be delegated is long standing. Perhaps I’m saying, on the margin, we should expand such freedom into more of the RDT&E activities. But the founders of DoD’s PPBE process disagreed on the line. Whereas Roland McKean favored a more diverse approach across RDT&E, Charles Hitch believed diversity applied only to early-stage S&T:
“It is important to distinguish between… research and development that is directed toward the development of new ideas and the testing of those ideas, on the one hand, and the fabrication of prototypes of operational systems, on the other… I think that the kinds of remarks that you have just quoted [greater diversity] are directly applicable to the first kind of research and development.”
By the way — Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program for social “moonshots,” funded by Collison and others, was the earliest version of these efforts. They funded me in the first cohort to start this blog and advocate for budget reform, giving me the kick I needed to get out of the Pentagon. As Tyler told me, the grant was really given to change the trajectory of my career. That it did.
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