Dear Commons Community,
Today’s edition of Science has a guest editorial by , an International Programs Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that focuses on the application process of research grants. His concern is based on the views of a growing coalition of reformers who have commented that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science.
His conclusion:
‘One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time.”
Important commentary.
Below is the entire editorial.
Ton
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Science
In (qualified) defense of the research project grant
Editorial
Pierre Azoulay
In a debate that has been building for years, a growing coalition of reformers has concluded that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science. Crystallizing this debate, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just committed $1.5 billion over the next decade to X-Labs, independent and milestone-driven research organizations meant to bypass not only the RPG but also the universities that have long been its principal recipients. Although the reform impulse may warrant sympathy, the X-Labs prescription merits skepticism.
Criticisms of RPGs cluster around several legitimate themes. Peer-review committees demand preliminary data so extensive that applicants must essentially complete their experiments before being funded to attempt them. Applications that were once a few pages can now be hundred-page compliance exercises. Success rates for federal research grants have fallen by half or more over the past half-century, forcing investigators into endless cycles of writing, rejection, and revision—a treadmill that crowds out contemplative thought. These are real pathologies. They diminish the attractiveness of scientific careers and skew the funded portfolio toward the incremental and the safe.
The reformers’ solution is elegant in theory. Rather than forcing scientists to write grants, give them stable institutional homes; rather than funding projects, fund people and organizations. Create a network of 10 or 20 institutes, each empowered by block funding (longterm, unrestricted institutional support) to pursue research programs the RPG cannot support. The promise is Bell Labs redux: the industrial lab that gave society the transistor, information theory, and the laser, none from a grant application.
The central confusion is that Bell Labs was not a government program, but the research arm of a regulated monopoly, AT&T, funded by captive ratepayers, accountable to no appropriations committee, free to operate on a time horizon no public agency could sustain. The true parentage of X-Labs is not Bell Labs but the continental model: Germany’s Max Planck Institutes (MPIs), France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the US Department of Energy (DOE) national labs.
MPIs operate on the Harnack principle: build an institute around a small group of exceptional scientists granted near absolute autonomy. On paper, scientific paradise; in practice, junior scientists live entirely at the director’s pleasure. CNRS researchers become civil servants for life in their early 30s—freedom from fundraising, paid for by an institution slow to adapt when priorities shift. DOE labs are block-funded, stable, and ossified by the safety and compliance apparatus that public funding inevitably brings. At $18 billion a year, they already do at scale much of what X-Labs propose to invent, a fact the X-Labs discourse has somehow overlooked. Block funding does not eliminate bureaucracy; it relocates it. The reformers compare the messy actual RPG to a platonic ideal of institutional science that has never existed under public auspices.
What the RPG gets right is easily overlooked because it is built into the mechanism, not into the wisdom of any administrator. The grant follows the investigator; a scientist treated badly can leave and take their funding with them, giving the scientist real bargaining power vis-à-vis their institution. The system also offers multiple doors—NSF, DOE, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies and private foundations—so that a paradigm out of favor at one agency may find support at another. NIH alone makes roughly 40,000 RPG awards a year, a portfolio that could support randomized experimentation and rigorous self-evaluation if agencies were so inclined, and that a handful of X-Labs could not. The bundling of research with graduate education that the RPG sustains is the commons from which any new institution would draw the scientists it proposes to redeploy.
One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time.
