IFP Update: New Science Funding Edition

It's time to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century

Hi friends,

There were two major announcements in the world of science policy recently, pointing in a bold new direction for the NSF and NIH:

• The National Science Foundation announced Tech Labs, a new initiative that will invest up to $1 billion over five years in large-scale, long-term funding to scientific teams working outside traditional university structures. It’s one of the most significant experiments in federal research funding in decades.

• Reps. Josh Harder (D-CA) and Jay Obernolte (R-CA) introduced bipartisan legislation to bring a similar model to NIH. The “Launching X-Labs for Breakthrough Science Act“ would establish a new funding track for independent research organizations, building on our X-Labs framework.

The basic insight behind both efforts is that a healthy research funding portfolio requires a diverse set of funding mechanisms. Small project-based grants to university scientists are like bonds: relatively low-risk, steady, and important for stability. But you wouldn’t want 2/3rds of your portfolio in bonds. Yet that’s roughly where we stand with grants to scientists across NSF and NIH today.

Meanwhile, the science that shapes the frontier, from particle physics to protein design, increasingly requires massive datasets, large interdisciplinary teams, and sustained institutional support. That’s a poor fit for a funding system built around small, short-term grants to individual scientists. Tech Labs and the X-Labs bill are attempts to rebalance the portfolio. We can maintain support for traditional grants while experimenting with higher-risk, higher-reward institutional bets.

There’s a larger community of scientists and reformers who have been pushing for these kinds of reforms for years, so it’s exciting to see real momentum building — from both parties, and across both major science agencies. IFP has formally endorsed the Harder-Obernolte bill as an important step toward ensuring the US remains the global leader in scientific discovery.

If you want to dive deeper, I wrote about the case for these reforms recently in the Wall Street Journal. Full text below.

Caleb

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Science Funding Goes Beyond the Universities

Caleb Watney, Wall Street Journal

The National Science Foundation announces Friday that it is launching one of the most significant experiments in science funding in decades. A new initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures, a major departure from how the agency has funded research over the past 75 years.

The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.

For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model. Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” sketched a vision of government-backed research led by university-based scientists pursuing their own ideas. The system that emerged—small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists—worked brilliantly for decades. It gave researchers autonomy, kept politics at arm’s length, and helped make American science the envy of the world.

But the frontier has moved. In 1945 world-class scientific research could be done with a few graduate students and modest equipment. But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support.

Take the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps explain why anything has mass—and thus why atoms, molecules and matter itself can exist. Making this discovery required a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator, thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and papers with multipage author lists.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem and earned researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, emerged from a team with access to massive computational resources and sustained institutional support.

The Janelia Research Campus in collaboration with other institutions mapped the complete wiring diagram of the fruit-fly brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, through years of coordinated microscopy and analysis that no single lab could attempt alone.

Yet our federal science funding system is still largely organized around small grants to university scientists. At the NSF, around two-thirds of research dollars flow through small awards to individual university investigators. At the National Institutes of Health, the share is often more than 80%. The average NSF grant is roughly $246,000 a year for three years, often requiring investigators to predict in advance exactly what research they’ll pursue and to spend a significant amount of time navigating administrative hurdles. Scientists consistently report spending close to half their research hours on compliance and grant management.

The system still produces good science, but it has weak points. The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure. Many advances we now celebrate succeeded despite the funding model, not because of it.

Philanthropy has stepped into this gap. Focused research organizations, a model backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, build time-limited teams around ambitious technical problems and tie funding to specific milestones that researchers must meet. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, launched with $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built the first comprehensive gene-expression map of the mouse brain through industrial-scale data collection that would have been impossible under fragmented academic grants. The Arc Institute offers scientists eight-year appointments backed by permanent technical staff with expertise in topics such as machine learning and genome engineering, the kind of sustained expertise that often evaporates when a three-year grant ends. These institutions bet on teams, not projects.

But philanthropy alone can’t reshape American science. The federal government spends close to $200 billion on research and development, orders of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve.

While final details are still being worked out, Tech Labs represents NSF’s attempt to do exactly that. Rather than funding isolated projects, the agency would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions. The program would bring the lessons of philanthropic science into a part of the federal portfolio that hasn’t seriously tried them.

This is a good political moment to launch this initiative. Republicans have expressed interest in diversifying federal research away from universities. Democrats want to see the legacy of the Chips and Science Act come to fruition and to get dollars out the door. By funding independent research organizations, Tech Labs sidesteps some of the thorniest debates about indirect costs and institutional overhead. Reps. Josh Harder (D., Calif.) and Jay Obernolte (R., Calif.) introduced bipartisan legislation on Wednesday that calls for applying a similar model of team-based funding to the National Institutes of Health.

None of this is an argument against traditional grants. Small project-based awards to individuals at universities remain important, especially for training the next generation of scientists and supporting curiosity-driven research. But a healthy funding portfolio needs more than one instrument. To borrow an analogy from finance, incremental project-based grants are like bonds: relatively low-risk, steady, important for stability. But you wouldn’t want 70% of your portfolio in bonds.

Tech Labs is a chance to rebalance. If it succeeds, it could begin to shift how America funds science. If it fails, we’ll learn something and use what we learn to change course. Either way, we’ll have taken the first serious step in decades toward experimenting with how America funds science. After all, isn’t science supposed to be about experiments?