Why not consider this an experiment in funding efficiency? This should be supported by scientists across the board, especially as it's such a tiny fraction of t

Why not consider this an experiment in funding efficiency? This should be supported by scientists across the board, especially as it's such a tiny fraction of the NIH budget. It's a bit much to claim to fully know the outcome of such an experiment before doing it. This being said, my priors are that it's a better funding model for engineering than for science. Engineering is more goal-oriented, whereas science is more exploratory. In science, it's not always a good idea to have a strongly desired outcome, because of problems associated with confirmation bias, or from spending too much time in the wrong rabbit hole. Apart from concerns about gaming the system (which are valid), the wrong phrasing of the goal could make it impossible to reach, or otherwise direct people in the wrong way. And it's not always clear that the understanding of some process or phenomenon will ever be done to some satisfaction; sometimes you get there and it's much more convoluted than anyone had previously assumed. The economist Tim Harford discusses the merits of this funding model quite a bit in Adapt, and is quite supportive of it, as are other economists such as Alex Tabarrok. But it's really not clear that they understand the differences between engineering and science, either. Most of the DARPA/X-prize research, which are the typical examples of this funding model working effectively, are engineering research rather than science qua science, or the exploration of natural phenomena. But given the NIH's aims (which are more practical than NSF's) and the recognition that blue-sky research needs to be funded differently, it might just be a great complement to the existing funding model. I would love to have a bit more of it for those of my own projects that are geared more towards tool/methods development than immediate phenomena understanding; I work on them in my spare time or in conjunction with scientific studies, and it'd be great if I could occasionally pay myself back for that time upon successful completion.