Research Grant Funding

Sounds like they don't want to spoil everyone's research grants!

Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the standard process for funding.One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as measured by time spent, is writing grant applications. Scientists spend a huge percentage of their working hours asking for money from an elaborate, high-overhead funding system that goes to great lengths to try to avoid spending money on the wrong things. But in practice the correlation between attractiveness of grant proposals and the quality of

People doing research funded by grants, rather than having 50% of their grant leeched off by a bloated administrative complex coasting on pedigree.

Two notes:- Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't.- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."

Most grants fund large projects out of which smaller papers are written. I don't think any grant is funding individual papers like you seem to imply

reading through this, it all sounds familiar. then it hits me. this is like trying to get a grant reviewed by the NIH!

This reeks of "Ph.D. project with funding".

This is not how research grants work.

It's a POC grant, more money should get unlocked if it succeeds. Smaller grants means more grants and more research (hopefully!).

When NIH/NSF sets funding priorities, provides information on what they think is important, etc, it is natural that scientists will submit applications more homogeneous than otherwise: Funding keeps the lab going. I wish that they'd instead create a system of block research grants to Universities, who'd then allocate funding. The whole grant process takes up too much time and makes Scientists into perpetual salesman.