Former research council chief warns NSF's priority-led funding may embolden UK advocates of the same approach

John Womersley, a former adviser to the US Department of Energy and former chief executive of the Science and Facilities Council, argues from resemblance ^[9]. "We're seeing the exact same questioning of the way it has always been done in UK Research and Innovation," he said ^[10]. The shared thread, he told THE, is "the idea that some of the research funding ought to be tied to priorities that are endogenous to the research system and not just coming up from individual researcher's curiosity" ^[11].

He also splits the US programme in two. One half is what he called an "ideologically driven attack", in which hundreds of grants have been slashed ^[12]. The other half, he said, is a pragmatic approach that a government of a different ideology could also implement and support ^[13]. His example is an initiative like X-Labs, the vehicle NSF says it will use to channel more funding to administration priorities ^[2].

Keiron Flanagan, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester, does not accept the influence argument ^[14]. "The UK has long been an international outlier in the extent of its concentration on basic research, and it doesn't need any US precedent to justify making a correction," he told THE ^[7]. His worry is execution: how to do more publicly funded applied research without damaging the capacity of the UK research base ^[8]. In our view, with the UKRI budget already divided into priority and basic areas ^[6], the live UK question is proportion. That holds only while the split stays as THE describes it.

Neal Lane, NSF director from 1993 to 1998, is far more critical, and more sweeping. He expects the move toward government-directed research "to continue in the US, UK and Europe" ^[15]. He puts AI behind it: a "huge unknown" that "is very likely to determine what research gets done and how" ^[16]. On security, he said "it is not clear how new security concerns require research investments", though he has admitted that "cybersecurity, AI and quantum may be exceptions" ^[18].

The thing this doesn't tell you is whether directed funding produces better research than investigator-led grants. All three views are forecasts or judgements, and all of them come from one THE report. The one item built to generate evidence on funding and productivity is the metascience collaboration, which NSF and UKRI announced last week ^[5].