The occasion is not a minor one. The US National Science Foundation has just committed a strategic $1.5 billion over a decade to these independent, milestone-driven institutes — organisations designed to bypass not only the traditional grant system, but also, more unsettlingly, the universities that remain the institutional engine of almost all the country’s basic science.
For my part, I would like to recall my own posts from 2023, because I have already walked the other side of this argument, and I am not about to pretend otherwise.In The Economist’s “The World Ahead 2024” — what constitutes the most efficient method for financing scientific endeavours? I argued that any honest discussion had to begin with the cost of the existing system. That cost is not merely financial. That post opened with the great unspoken scandal of the grant system: the sheer amount of human life it consumes. Australian researchers, in a single year, collectively spent an astonishing 614 years writing grant applications.
The post then examined the alternatives. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, founded in 1953, stands apart precisely because it funds researchers, not projects — generously, for seven years or more — and then largely leaves them alone. The result? Nearly twice as many highly cited articles as the standard funding model, and a record that includes more than thirty Nobel prizes. The success was so difficult to ignore that it helped inspire, in 2021, the creation of a new research institute at Stanford — the Arc Institute — built on a similar principle.
So should I now applaud the National Science Foundation for finally seeing the light and writing a $1.5 billion cheque to the "fund people, not projects" ? I should not — and here is the distinction the reformers are careful never to draw. What made Howard Hughes work was never that it was an institute. It was that it was a private foundation that selected ruthlessly for excellence, held its people to account, and retained the courage to let them go. A state-run X-Lab, handed to the very incumbents who built the present bureaucracy, will do the precise opposite. Block funding does not abolish bureaucracy it shelters it. It is the institutional cousin of that obscene rubber stamp in my own country: a country whose last scientific Nobel Prize dates back more than 70 years, but where the machinery of self-congratulation has somehow discovered that 75% of research units were classified as "Excellent or Very Good" !!!
This is why the author I cited is right, though for a reason he barely dares to state plainly: the grant’s one redeeming virtue is that it follows the scientist. A researcher trapped under a feudal director can still walk out and take the money with them. That portability — not block funding, not institutional palaces, not another taxpayer-financed grotesque sanctuary for incumbents — is the only serious antidote to academic serfdom academia has ever devised.
