Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Our Howard Silver looks over some of the personnel changes and rhetoric coming from the White House to see what lies down the road for U.S. government support of social and behavioral science and data collection.
UPDATED WITH HOUSE PASSAGE: A bill that was the latest version of the beloved America COMPETES — but which no longer authorizes funding for key federal science research agencies — looks likely to land on the president’s desk. The new version has lost a particularly toxic aspect of earlier versions.
Erich Bloch was the first non-academic to serve as director of the NSF. Although a computer engineer by background, he recognized the value of the social and behavioral sciences.
For the fourth straight year, federal funding for research and development at institutions of higher education decreased in absolute terms, according to a new brief on the 2015 fiscal year the National Science Foundation released last week. Despite that overall fall, research and development funding for psychology and for fields identified as social science increased from 2014 to 2015.
In a hearing before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on science spending Tuesday, the National Science Foundation’s budget was listed as $7.51 billion — $46 million above the same figure for the current fiscal year, but lower than what President Obama had asked for.
Legislation that requires that future grants made by the National Science Foundation meet a test for being in the ‘national interest’ passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
UPDATED with COSSA analysis: Social and behavioral science funded by the U.S. government appears to have received an early Christmas present as leaders in the House of Representatives unveiled a $1.1 trillion spending bill to keep the federal enterprise funded in 2016.
Picking up where Tom Coburn left off, the new U.S. senator from Oklahoma has released a punny compendium of what he sees as wasteful federal spending , including the inevitable shots at social and behavioral science grants.