RECOVERING WITH RESEARCH: Funding-hungry agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, received a welcome bonus with the economic stimulus bill last year. It has allowed them to back a wealth of research endeavors, but will the payout to the economy be as quick?
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So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package, which was passed a year ago today.
But has this money been as much of a boon to the economy has it has been to science?
When advocating for the bill last January, President Obama called for "investing in the science, research and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries and entirely new industries." Progress would not come immediately, he warned, but when he signed the bill, an unprecedented influx of funds funneled to agencies flush with project proposals but lacking the cash to back them. This money set the grant-giving gears in motion, but the research pipeline itself can be prodigiously long.
Although barely a pipette drop of the full $787-billion federal stimulus plan, the NSF's $3-billion portion of the package represented an almost 50 percent boost for its 2009 $6.5-billion budget. "That investment of $3 billion will have an immediate impact on investigators, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, and teachers throughout the nation," the agency asserted on its Web site.
Indeed, in the past year, the NSF has allocated some $2.5 billion of its stimulus share, adding 4,599 research-based projects (in addition to facility improvements and educational awards) to its list of recipients.
Only about $136 million of that money has been spent, however. That's about 4.5 percent, which puts the NSF second to last among federal agencies in the percentage of stimulus allocation expended. (The most expeditious spenders include the Social Security Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board, which have shelled out about 88 and 91 percent respectively, and the slowest has been the Department of the Treasury, having spent about 3.2 percent of its $89 billion.)
So where is all of the NSF's stimulus money? It is in university and institutional bank accounts, from which funded researchers will gradually withdraw funds over the duration of multiyear grants and awards to pay for equipment and staff. "The NSF has obligated that money, and it's sitting in the accounts of the awardees," explains Dana Topousis, an NSF spokesperson.
Picking the winners
But before even a single beaker could be bought, the NSF—a funding agency—had to decide which projects would get a piece of the new capital.
"NSF has never had enough money," says Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist and director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. So, although the funds have been a booster for science, it and many other agencies are not set up to handle this processing load. "It's just hard to make the federal bureaucracy move fast," she says.
Between 2003 and 2008 the NSF was able to fund only about a quarter of the research proposals it received. But with the 2009 stimulus funds, that total reached 32 percent (about what it had been with its standard operating budget in 2000) even though the numbers of proposals had increased by thousands.
Last year, the NSF received more than 45,200 proposals, so when the stimulus bill was passed, program officers gave another look to deserving proposals they had not previously had the resources to fund. Some 80 percent of stimulus-backed awards went to projects that had been submitted prior to the act. By contrast, the National Institutes of Health and many other agencies put out a call for new proposals.
NSF staffers made an effort to support investigators who had not previously been granted received awards, funding 2,352 new researchers—about a third of them through the ARRA. But amidst fear of fraud and waste, the agency also had to work carefully to pick proposals that would make wise use of the money. To make all these assessments, NSF staff members worked "around the clock" last summer to select the new awardees, the agency's Topousis says.
Although the agency did not hire extra workers to assess all of the proposals on the receiving end, creating more jobs in the science community was a top priority. "Most of our awards are saving jobs—or creating jobs for graduate and postdoc students," Topousis says.
Some critics have argued that the glut of temporary, low-level research positions in academia have created an impasse in academic institutions, where few can break through to tenure-track jobs in which they can obtain big research grants and run their own laboratories. But others note that in the short term, these positions are helping to translate money for science into a cash injection for the economy—and fast.
"It already does have the immediate impact to attract and hire staff," says Amy Pienta, an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who is using an ARRA-funded NSF grant to evaluate the stimulus's impact on the social sciences. Most of the awards may not be big enough to fund senior-level positions, she says, but many of them will "certainly" help hire "people who are on the front lines of a lot of the work—on data collection, data analysis." She offers as an example her own project, which will hire someone to do computer programming. "We're able to advertise in the community," she says. "That's pretty immediate."
The bottom line is that "universities hire," Grifo says. And the money—whether it creates a new full-time staff position or a part-time student opportunity—will be going directly to people "who are going to spend it to live," Grifo says. "They're using that money immediately to pay their bills." She adds: "With graduate research fellowships in particular…it goes out there quickly."
Not all of the money will stay inside of ivory tower walls. A good chunk of NSF's Recovery Act funds (some $354 million) is going directly to construction expenses for labs and research vessels. So those funds will funnel out more quickly, much like other government construction contracts, to pay for labor and materials.
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11 Comments
Add CommentI think the most important subject for use of this money is in trying to understand in a scientific way how our money and our macroeconomy actually works! Mostly macroeconomics is not regarded as an exact science and the amout of contravercy about it suggests that the situation has yet to be properly resolved. As a researcher on this matter it soon becomes clear that one needs to build a model of the system in order to understand it and its ability to function. So the problem then becomes which model.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy research is centered in firstly choosing a model that satisfies the "Einstein Criterion" which rather like Ockam's Razor calls for as much simplicity as possible provided it is not over-simplified. By looking at the situation from sufficiently great a distance, many of the less important details can be avoided. The model I choose is not based on individuals in the society but rather on how blocks of the function, in all of the somewhat limited possible ways. Thus the personal and individual workings are avoided in the same manner as the gas laws, which are not directly concerned with separate molecular collisions. The irrefutable logic of taking this approach and the relatively simple model that follows is a more scientific and reasonable way of providing answers to what should be done to get back in the technical roale of national progress.
I think the most important subject for use of this money is in trying to understand in a scientific way how our money and our macroeconomy actually works! Mostly macroeconomics is not regarded as an exact science and the amout of contravercy about it suggests that the situation has yet to be properly resolved. As a researcher on this matter it soon becomes clear that one needs to build a model of the system in order to understand it and its ability to function. So the problem then becomes which model.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy research is centered in firstly choosing a model that satisfies the "Einstein Criterion" which rather like Ockam's Razor calls for as much simplicity as possible provided it is not over-simplified. By looking at the situation from sufficiently great a distance, many of the less important details can be avoided. The model I choose is not based on individuals in the society but rather on how blocks of the function, in all of the somewhat limited possible ways. Thus the personal and individual workings are avoided in the same manner as the gas laws, which are not directly concerned with separate molecular collisions. The irrefutable logic of taking this approach and the relatively simple model that follows is a more scientific and reasonable way of providing answers to what should be done to get back in the technical road leading toward national progress.
Even if you arrive at some kind of "model" of this economy thing, you then have to do some predictions and get them right, and even then it's unlikely that any notice will be taken.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn example from my own current experience.
I point-out to all and sundry - particularly government investors - in "Windfarms" that in the case of a "Wind turbine" - (which must in fact needs be a wind Turbine-Alterntor combination) - Bigger is not neccessarily better - i.e. cheaper - because Ts and A's have Opposite "economy of size". Now there is nothing in the least "simplified" or "ignored" here. The situation is very simple and totally defined. Yet I may as well save my fingers and head the effort and go look for oil, for all the notice that is taken.
The lowest cost way of facing any given area of weather can be seen to be with wind Turbine-Alternator devices of such a size that the T costs about the same as the A. This happens at around One metre diameter, oddly enough. A very convenient size. Just under this size the required coupling ratio becomes 1:1.
If "they" cannot /willnot get their heads around this, what hope is there for any "model" of a system which makes the "kinetic theory of gases" look equally simple ?
some or maybe 50% of this should go to creating factories that actually produce the product....example i believe i read about MIT producing a better battery(lithium iron?) but have seen nothing since except to see they may try suing the Chinese over the patent....why aren't we building the factories here and NOW...pure research is great but applying it should be atleast as important...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjust watched "who killed the electric car" last night and got very depressed/mad....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome years ago scientists proved that you can extract carbon from crude oil and methane before you burn it. The result is no need for expensive CO2 capture and storage, no pollution and cheap disposal of carbon in local land fill sites. The technology transforms our filthy carbon society into a clean hydrogen one for the time required to develop alternative energy sources such as laser fusion. This is surely a process that would make good use of government research funding?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat an unfortunate (and inaccurate) quote from Tana Touposis in the article. Although the funds have been obligated to the awardees, the money is not sitting in an awardees bank account for the awardee to spend whenever they want. Dropping $3 Billion straight into awardee bank accounts would be fiscally irresponsible and contravene federal cash management regulations. In fact, the money is available for awardees to draw down from NSF as needed when it will be used for program purposes in the near-term future. NSF is following standard practice and federal regulations in the cash management of its ARRA funded awards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to release few of my discoveries in the field of Arithmatic (the Queen of all sciences), if I'm gonna get compensated for it financialy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to release few of my discoveries in the field of Arithmatic (the Queen of all sciences), if I'm gonna get compensated for it financialy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to release few of my discoveries in the field of Arithmatic (the Queen of all sciences), if I'm gonna get compensated for it financialy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps some funding should be given to develop subsidy auditing to measure the efficiency of government investment in research. For example, how many grants result directly in the subsequent creation of viable start-ups? This should not be too difficult to measure...
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