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.