SPONSORED RESEARCH IS RISK-AVERSE AND UNIMAGINATIVE.

An earlier post with that title opened,

I've come close to, but never explicitly said, that the use of the national institutes and national endowments to support academic research is censorship per se.  The closest I have come is to suggest that creativity that might otherwise be unbridled and more enthusiastic gets diverted into chasing whatever it is the institutes, endowments, and charitable foundations are funding.  "Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen."  It might be worse than that.  "Even if it's not that bad, the sponsored research imperative diverts thoughtful people from playing with whatever ideas appeal to them (yes, many of them might turn out to be bad or trivial, but that's how emergence works) in order to follow what appears to be a Hot Topic (the tragedy being that by the time those grants and working papers hit the conference and journal circuits, the discipline's stars are on to other things) or to make some money."

Put bluntly, it's money wasted.

The James G. Martin Center's Edward Archer characterizes grantsmanship as fostering "The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research."  In particular, "My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields."

That second post landed in January, 2020, shortly before the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding involved furrin cleavages.

Alas, for all Our President's efforts at swamp-draining, or swapping out one set of rent-seekers for another, it will still be business as usual, argues J. Scott Turner, in academic science.  "For 75 years, Washington has preached that science needs more government. The White House still believes it."

The "Science: A New Golden Age" report nods to Vannevar Bush's "Science: The Endless Frontier" in its cover and in its topics.  Both policy approaches, though, leave the same incentives in place.

Science is not in deep trouble because Bad People have been doing Bad Things. Science is in deep trouble because we have been deliberately subsidizing and incentivizing the Bad Things for more than 70 years. This has happened because the enormous stream of government revenues directed to science has dramatically reshaped the landscape of incentives and disincentives governing the practices and careers of people working in the system.

"Dramatically reshaped the landscape of incentives" is a polite, long-winded way of suggesting "censorship per se," nicht wahr?  Moreover, Mr Turner suggests, the "endless frontier" Professor Bush invoked emerged before the War in the spirit of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit the highly regarded and well-endowed universities borrowed from their German counterparts.  Yes, during the War federal money created nuclear weapons and the intellectual foundations for supersonic aircraft and perhaps mass production of penicillin and polio vaccines, but perhaps using public money to establish "national priorities" for the messy and emergent business of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge constrains that creativity.

Prior to World War II, before the scientific abundance gospel became doctrine, science and government mostly kept each other at arm’s length, and the “invisible hand” of a free economy shaped by the infinitude of free individuals guided American prosperity and power to unprecedented heights.

After the War, no less an authority than President Eisenhower noted the risks of knowledge production being captured by a (government funded?) "scientific elite."  Better, perhaps, for the government to go away, rather than to retrain all the specialists in the sponsored projects offices of the universities to talk to venture capitalists rather than to bureaucrats.

Mr Turner's essay is one of two offered at Minding the Campus on Our President's proposed changes.  The other is by David Randall with the National Association of Scholars, and it will also reward careful study.

We have concerned ourselves significantly with the irreproducibility crisis of modern science: the combination of improper research techniques, slipshod statistics, lack of accountability, disciplinary and political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results, which together have made one half or more of modern scientific and social scientific results irreproduced and perhaps irreproducible. We have also focused on the reliability of science that informs government regulation. We have also wrestled with how to restore to science an ethic of discovery rather than an ethic of grant-getting, especially by unwinding the “Big Science Cartel.”

Our first concern inclines us toward tighter federal requirements to ensure research reproducibility; our second concern underpins a strategic emphasis on removing the federal government from science altogether.

That "removing the federal government from science altogether" refers to the day-to-day funding of academic research and the promulgation of "National Content Standards," for better or for worse; not to matters of public health.

Oh, wait, when the public health bureaucrats recently advised us to "trust the science" that didn't work out so well, did it?