[Fomite]

Surveys don't cut it. There's clinical costs associated with each subject - getting accurate clinical data, biomarkers, needing the infrastructure to store biological specimens for decades. There's methodological issues, planning that needs to get figured out, and the people who do that are not cheap.

The NCS was planned and known to be a massive undertaking, to try to ask some very serious questions about health that are hard to get out without long-term cohort studies.

[lpolovets]

I totally agree with you that this is a complex project with a lot of costs. Still, it's hard for me to fathom where so much money could go. I mean, if you give 100k people 5 top-of-the-line wearables over 7 years (maybe $1500/person); hire 250 experts, each of whom charges $250k/year; and allocate $15m/year on AWS hosting bills... you still wind up at "only" about $700m.

I'm sure the money went somewhere. I'd be really curious to see a breakdown of where.

[Fomite]

http://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/about/funding/Pages/in...

Table down at the bottom. As of 2011, 60% of the spend money was spent at the study sites themselves. From the text of that report, it sounds like recruitment was very expensive, which isn't surprising.