[nis0s]

I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.

[xphos]

I disagree any of the bloat you are talking about exists because puffying paper numbers is basically required to justify your work. Its because they were distrusted extensively so they have to ritually say their work is useful. Also I think its very challenging because most extra committees and stuff exist because people complained about how streamlined science use to be. Those committees exist because science got wrongfully accused of wasting money in the 80/90s with the golden fleece awards among other things, where republican's claimed someone's basic science research was a total waste of government money. Ironically many of the things that won a golden fleece ended up saving the country billions if not trillions of dollars overtime.

I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.

[insane_dreamer]

better to have some overfunded labs who are able to receive more PhD candidates, than underfunded labs who have to cut their graduate programs

besides, what happened was funding was cut altogether, not redirected from "underperforming and overfunded labs" to "high performing and worthy labs"