DARPA is a funding agency. It employs only admin and program management people, only about 300 of them, and spends around $4B a year, dispersing most of it to u

DARPA is a funding agency. It employs only admin and program management people, only about 300 of them, and spends around $4B a year, dispersing most of it to universities and third party labs. It’s leaner than the NSF, which employs five times as many people and has a budget only twice as large. Probably NSF has a large number of small-dollar grants to track compared to DARPA.