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Comment by currymj | Hacker News Reader

A bill, the Endless Frontiers Act, has been introduced in both houses of Congress to make a section of the National Science Foundation that works more like DARPA, while massively increasing its funding. The idea is to extend the DARPA model to many more non-military areas, just as suggested in this article.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-lawmakers-unveil-...

Certainly a timely article. I don't know whether it's a good thing or not. The DARPA model has certainly been productive, but it isn't suited for every research topic or subdiscipline.

As discussed in the article, currently NSF is the most open to basic science of funding agencies, and gives grantees the most latitude in what they work on. That is a valuable thing to have in the ecosystem.

If Congress expects the majority of publicly-funded research even from the NSF to be on short-term grants for specific visions and technologies, it will rule out working on a lot of important things.

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Author here. I actually wrote a discussion of the Endless Frontier Act: https://benjaminreinhardt.com/the-endless-frontier-act/

I agree that the ARPA model is not suitable for all (or even the majority of research) and the act doesn't inspire confidence that shifting the NSF towards a DARPA-like model would do well.

Just wanted to say, thanks for writing the article about DARPA, and this analysis of the endless frontiers act. From reading both articles, obviously you're very pro-DARPA and anti-NSF.

I have two thoughts that might erode your thesis a bit, that 1) I think you're overestimating the amount of time that faculty spend on writing grants. We like to complain about it, but I've tracked my time to the minute over the past 7 years, and grant writing (both the proposals and the reports) is about 2% of my work time. 2) You might be misunderstanding indirect costs like many people, where you say "Universities can take more than half of grant money as administrative overhead". Indirect cost math is funny, but in order for administrative overhead to be more than half of the grant, the indirect cost rate would have to be over 100%. I can explain more if you're interested.

Obviously we're both biased by our job, but it's still useful to read your perspective.

Appreciate the correction about indirect cost math - I’ve applied for several grants but never did lab accounting so I interpreted it incorrectly when professors told me “50% overhead.” I’ll fix that when I’m at a computer.

I would characterize my position as less “pro DARPA and anti NSF” and more “I think on the margin the world needs more DARPA-like activity more than it needs more NSF-like activity”

There is also already ARPA-E, which is a similar mandate to DARPA (i.e., risky projects with high payoff) for energy technology. How effective it has been thus far is a matter of debate due to a variety of factors, but I like the basic idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E

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