REVITALIZING AMERICA’S SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ENTERPRISE

To reverse stagnation and restore breakthrough momentum, the Federal Government must free American scientists to do their best work. Federal funding in academia remains anchored to mid-century assumptions, channeled through traditional disciplines and overly focused on short, project-based grants. Review panels often gatekeep proposals by consensus, disincentivizing transformative ideas. Agencies face little corrective pressure when portfolios underperform.

We must strip away unnecessary burdens, realign funding toward excellence and risk-taking, and embed continuous, evidence-based improvement across an approximately $200 billion annual R&D portfolio.

• Refocus on the Individual Scientist: Put the working researcher back at the center of America’s scientific enterprise. Free them from the growing administrative burdens that now weigh them down for nearly half their working hours. Bet on people, not just projects, by expanding portable graduate fellowships like the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), backing early-career independence, and scaling long-horizon grants for the best and brightest modeled on National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award. Open alternative pathways beyond standard academia, and ensure that selection rests purely on merit, not the political fashions of the day.

• Diversify Funding Mechanisms: Move beyond consensus-driven peer review by adopting a broader menu of selection mechanisms suited to different kinds of science. Examples include “golden tickets” that empower individual reviewers to champion ambitious proposals, fast grants that deliver rapid funding decisions, prize challenges and advanced market commitments that pay for results, and regranting models that delegate funding authority to scientists to draw on distributed expertise.

• Create New Institutional Models: Many of today’s most important problems are too large for an academic lab, too cross-disciplinary for a single department, and too hard to commercialize for a private corporation. Federal funding should support a wider range of performers. The recently launched X-Labs can assemble agile, time-bound teams of professional scientists and engineers to break specific bottlenecks. Advanced Research Projects Agencies (ARPAs) can empower individual program managers to make bold bets and curate researchers to execute them. Curiosity-driven institutes can give our best minds the stability needed to pursue fundamental questions over long time horizons.

• Reduce Bureaucratic Burdens: Requirements on federal grants have ballooned over the past decades. Some grants now take nearly two years from submission to award, almost as long as it took to design and produce the first Boeing 747. Compress review cycles, eliminate duplicative reporting, and rein in indirect cost recovery that supports administrative bloat, redirecting that money to real scientific infrastructure. Advance reforms that reduce grant-writing burdens, with relief directed specifically to earlycareer researchers.

• Institutionalize Continuous Improvement: Funders should bring the same critical attention to their own performance that they are supposed to bring to the review of grant applications. Stand up an empowered metascience unit in federal science agencies, reporting directly to the director, with authority to run controlled experiments on review and funding mechanisms and to drive change across the organization. Elevate the prestige of program officers, grow their discretion in setting scientific direction, and support them as the architects of the fields they help shape.