Federal R&D is inefficient – 40% of time is spent on applications
Derek Thompson, 2021 – staff writer at the Atlantic “America Needs a New Scientific Revolution” The Atlantic, November, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/grants-american-scientific-revolution/620609/ //DH
Most scientific funding in the United States flows from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This funding is famously luxurious; the NIH and NSF allocate about $50 billion a year. It is also infamously laborious and slow. Scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on research grants rather than on research. And funding agencies sometimes take seven months (or longer) to review an application, respond, or request a resubmission. Anything we can do to accelerate the grant-application process could hugely increase the productivity of science.