Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.

>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions

Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?

"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.

Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.

> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds

I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.

The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.

Ok... If it's not the most efficient way to allocate funds, it's now your job to design a more efficient way. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!

Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.

There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants

The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.

It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.

> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds

Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)

Whether or not it's efficient isn't as much of a concern as if it's being gamed. Reports of growing university administrations, increase in the cost of an education, and biases in the publish-or-perish model show the old model is no longer effective.