Program Pathologies

Government-funded research programs can sometimes develop pathologies, even in prestigious, peer-reviewed agencies like the National Science Foundation, but definitely not limited to the NSF. Program pathologies can be insidious and not necessarily the intentional result of a biased program manager.

The most serious pathology in terms of the overall health of science and use of taxpayer dollars is what I call the "self-fulfilling prophecy" program. When an agency requires peer-review of proposals for research, the program manager must find capable experts who are both willing and able to do reviews. This should be a learning experience as well as a community service effort that scientists look forward to, but the load can also be onerous when faced with pressures of teaching, research, and maintaining continuity of funding to support one's graduate students and laboratory facilities. The closer the request to review is to the actual program that a scientist might apply to, or already be funded from, the more likely they will agree to serve. An incentive exists also to find out what's new in a program as well as to survey a sampling of the competition. Involvement like this, however, is a slippery slope.

Reviewers tend to like to see proposals along the lines of the kind of research they are doing and tend to dislike newer, unproven approaches. Part of this is because familiar research is easier to judge, the references are familiar, and reviewers expect to (and probably should) see their own work referenced in the proposal. Untested approaches are a harder case to make under most any circumstances. Reviewers are also more tolerant of program managers who share their opinions and approaches than they are of managers who look for trying out something new once and a while. In fact, program managers are not immune to the positive feedback they receive from world-class reviewers who treat them as equals in some sense. The ego needs a boost once and a while in any government job, and kind words from a big name researcher are certainly nice to receive.

The result over time of the tendencies discussed above leads to a "self-fulfilling prophecy" program, or to one in which proposal funding decisions are based more on similarity to work already being done than on a truly objective judgment. It could be said that reviewers are choosing to fund their "friends," knowing that their friends will, in turn, choose to fund them. This pathology may not be intentional, but it sometimes works out that way anyway. Program managers who should be forcing the centroid of the program to be constantly shifting may resist doing so for fear of displeasing those who have heaped praise on them for running such a fine program. Again, this pathology may be more latent than overt, but the bias is often there anyway.

While programs in all agencies are subject to such pathologies, the National Science Foundation has a mission to maintain the health of science on its own principles and must constantly seek to identify pathological programs and seek to change them. Inviting over one-third of its program managers to serve short terms on loan from Universities is one way to try to overcome these tendencies. Other ways have also been used, such as creating initiatives from time to time that are syntheses of different areas that have not before been considered in the same program. In a sense, the best NSF programs are those that constantly change and seek to be on the border between comfortable science and risk-taking.