Many of their employees have drop dead salaries. And the same time these department are corrupt as fuck (say hand out of SBIR grants to buddies). I know I will be down voted but trust me, I won't shed a tear about these cuts.
But just FYI: I had a SBIR grant rejected and it was rejected with a cause. But I also had a SBIR grant rejected and the rejection was totally bullshit. There can't be another name for this but corruption. At the same time, when I submitted this application, a buddy who got a major SBIR grant in the past told me not to have high hopes. He explained to me how and why his proposal was selected from the big stack of proposals. It is not an open race.
Don't shed a tear. I am sure this officials with their high 6 figs salaries can easily find a job in the private sector. Enjoy!
So you've had 2 grant proposals rejected—and even you only claim 1 of them was incorrect. So your solution to a grant rejection is to burn the whole system down?
The second one had nothing comparable. We had peer reviewed publications. Nobody had this in this field. The main argument was that it is financially not feasible for mass production. The reviewer was off by factor 100.
The guy who got the proposal, he told me how it went. I don't want to go into details.
Does this answer your questions?
Now you want to burn down the agency because you had two SBIR proposals rejected, which is statistically to be expected for good proposals and certainly for proposals which you describe as "not feasible" and "not suitable for mass production" (yes, I realize the second description was applied by the reviewer not by you, but that response indicates you failed to adequately make the business case for your proposal which is essential to success in every SBIR application process).
Getting funding for ideas is hard. It always has been and always will be because there are more good ideas than dollars. Most proposals, including most good proposals, will never get funded. This isn't a conspiracy. It's a fact.
Burning down our scientific infrastructure and slashing its funding because it's currently not funded at a level that allows it to do the things you want it to do is a strange response at best.
I know. But I thought it is based on merit. If you try to tell me it is a lottery it should require very few people.
"Now you want to burn down the agency because you had two SBIR proposals rejected," Reading is not your stength. Somebody explained me, how grants are given and I don't think I like the idea.
In situations where there are far more good ideas than funding, good ideas will be rejected. This is mathematics. No other outcome is possible (well, technically you could also distribute the same total resources among all good ideas instead of among a subset of good ideas, but spreading the same total budget across a much larger number of projects means a total of zero projects receive adequate funding to be completed and the resulting outcome is worse than the subset-funding outcome).
Good ideas being rejected doesn't mean it's "just a lottery" where no work needs to be done to select the ideas that are to be funded. Most ideas are not good ideas, even in situations where there are more good ideas than resources. Filtering down to that group of good ideas still takes considerable time and effort, even in the case where most of the good ideas will in the end not be funded because there are more good ideas than resources.
Most people don't get funded. Most people with good ideas don't get funded. That's not the fault of the system. It's mathematics that no one involved in the process wants but everyone involved in the process has to work with.
This was not a vague idea, this was a project that was very advanced. Obviously nothing came out of the funded ideas or I would have heard about.
But again. I was told how this grants are given and I am glad I don't waste my time with it anymore. I played Hare and Tortoise too long already in my life. I became successful when I stopped playing it.