Eli Lehrer and M. Anthony Mills write,
federal support for basic research should be decentralized and diversified. The current model is almost the inverse of Bush’s model: He envisioned a single independent agency, staffed by scientists, that would disperse funds widely across a range of nongovernmental institutions, and he assumed these institutions would retain autonomy and control over their research agendas and personnel. What Bush recognized is that science is best conducted in a vibrant marketplace of ideas with minimal bureaucratic oversight.
Just enough bureaucratic oversight to remind us to avoid more of it.
There is a major lacuna in our understanding of how ‘science’ – especially basic research – has been typically funded. We collectively fail to appreciate the role that calendar years play as opposed to billable hours. There are some unexplored trade-offs in the research productivity of scientists who have ‘day jobs’ – clinicians, industry, teachers – and don’t use research funding to cover most of their daily expenses. Historically, this was the norm; but then the rise of government funding led to research specialists – really, grant getting specialists – and an erosion of institutional ‘support’ / requirements.
This greatly distorts our picture of what is being spent where, what it produces, etc.
In the linked article, Lehrer and Mills, strongly advocate for central federal government to play the primary role in funding and choosing grants, so they absolutely want centralization in that sense. They just want to decentralize the spending.
Others, notably Terence Kealey advocates getting government out of research entirely, eliminating all government grants, and letting private donors and networks take over. Many scientists dependent on government grants are quite outraged.
Lehrer and Mills write:
Kealey argues the opposite, that there is a substitute for central government control, there are absolutely viable ways for the private sector to provide funding.
Bryan Caplan, advocates for “separation of school and state” and I believe this extends to research spending. But Caplan seems a somewhat weak kneed advocate of this. For all Caplan’s arguments for free markets and against government coercion, Caplan has lived his whole life in government institutions that are separated from free market mechanisms.
On this topic there is Michael Polyani’s ” The Logic of Liberty” (London, 1951; Liberty Fund Reprint 1998.
Recommended.
We would probably get a more ideologically diverse, if not perfectly objective, science community by eliminating federal science grants, and instead expanding tax breaks for those who fund science efforts by anybody, in return for a publication requirement like the one Bush tried, with partial success, to impose on NSF/NIST.
Any company can conduct research tax free. Research is an expense.
Maybe decentralize funding by taking all the public expenditure on research and giving each citizen a research voucher which they can donate to any research institution, grant, or lab they please. If people care more about cancer research than the gendered naming of hurricanes, money will go to the former and not the latter. Biased research will still be conducted, but at least it will reflect the biases of the public at large rather than those of a few unelected bureaucrats, for what that’s worth.