Technofeudalists Conquer the National Science Foundation (NSF)?

from Google AI:

The NSF Tech Labs initiative is a newly launched program by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). It is designed to create a new generation of independent research organizations that focus on solving complex technical bottlenecks that traditional academic or industry labs cannot easily address. 

Key Features of the Initiative

• Targeted Teams: The program funds full-time, interdisciplinary teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers rather than individual principal investigators or isolated projects.
• Operational Autonomy: Selected teams operate with a high degree of independence from existing academic and industry constraints to pursue breakthroughs at "breakneck speed".
• Significant Funding: NSF anticipates making large, multi-year awards in Fiscal Year 2026, with funding for high-performing teams expected to range from $10 million to $50 million per year.
• Milestone-Based Model: Unlike traditional annual grants, funding is tied to demonstrating technical progress toward commercially viable platforms.
• Phased Implementation:

Selection Process: A 90-day initial selection period.

Phase 0: A nine-month planning phase for concept refinement and team building.

Phase 1: A two-year period for scaling operations and pushing for real-world impact.

Phase 2: Extended support for high-performing teams to transition innovations to market. 

Strategic Goals

The initiative aims to bridge the "valley of death" between foundational research and commercialization. It draws inspiration from models like Focused Research Organizations (FROs) and the Janelia Research Campus, focusing on platform technologies that can reshape entire sectors like AI, quantum technology, and biotechnology.

Companion Program

NSF TIP also introduced the Tech Accelerators Initiative as a companion effort. While it shares core principles with Tech Labs, it provides wider entry points for teams specifically focused on technology translation in key national priority areas. 

Would you like more details on the Request for Information (RFI) process or specific eligibility requirements for these awards

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Michael Gibson, "How to Break America’s Great Scientific Stagnation"

President Trump’s selection of Jim O’Neill to head the National Science Foundation could open the next great chapter of discovery.

The biggest factor holding back an American revolution in science is not money but talent identification. For more than half a century, risk-averse bureaucracies and universities have let bold ideas and promising discoveries wither on the vine under the guise of credentialed expertise and the virtues of peer-reviewed incrementalism.

The evidence for this Great Scientific Stagnation is substantial. Research productivity is declining sharply across many domains. Federal R&D spending is more than 30 times what it was in 1956, and more scientists are trained and more papers published than ever. Yet revolutionary breakthroughs are becoming rarer. Many peer-reviewed findings fail to replicate, and a high probability exists that the vast majority of papers (which no one reads) are full of false conclusions. Accusations of fraud in science are on the rise.

America must break through this chokepoint by focusing on its greatest resource: talent. It matters how, and to whom, we award grants. We should be working toward tapping the energy at the heart of the sun and hanging our achievements in the balance of the stars. Instead, federal science funding has often drifted elsewhere: on promoting insects as human food ($2.5 million), watching monkeys gamble ($3.7 million), observing brain-damaged cats walk on treadmills ($549,000), and sending cash to DEI bird watching clubs ($288,563).

Fortunately, American science may soon get a lot more exciting—faster, wilder, and even more rigorous. On March 2, President Trump nominated Silicon Valley financier Jim O’Neill as director of the National Science Foundation. O’Neill served most recently as Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With a budget of nearly $9 billion, the NSF determines which nonmedical scientists receive funding, which university labs are supported, and which frontiers advance. With O’Neill at the helm, the old slow-drip model of incremental, consensus-driven funding would get a much-needed shake-up.

But O’Neill must first clear the Senate confirmation process, and the opposition is already sharpening its knives. California Representative Zoe Lofgren, the leading Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, told Science that O’Neill isn’t fit for the office. “[G]iven his track record at HHS and CDC under [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.], Mr. O’Neill seems like a bad choice to lead the National Science Foundation, our nation’s premier scientific agency.”

Science ran a second article featuring scientists skeptical of O’Neill. Neal Lane, a former NSF director under President Bill Clinton and a physicist at Rice University, said, “I think it’s unfair to ask him to do the job”—largely because O’Neill lacks an advanced science degree. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, added that he sees O’Neill and the Trump administration’s direction as overly commercial and “shortsighted.”

Full disclosure: I owe O’Neill a great deal personally. In 2010, he introduced me to Peter Thiel, for whom he then worked as head of the Thiel Foundation and a research lead at his hedge fund. On my first day, September 27, 2010, we launched the Thiel Fellowship, which awarded 20 young people a year $100,000 grants—with two notable conditions: applicants had to be under 19 and agree to drop out of college.

Critics torched the Thiel Fellowship from the start. My favorite was Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, who called our program the “single most misdirected philanthropy of the decade.” Today, however, the fellowship is a strong predictor of future billionaires. Its grantees have generated more than $500 billion in value since the program began. Its hit rate—the share of fellows who start tech companies that reach $1 billion in market cap—exceeds that of top accelerators like Y Combinator and institutions like Harvard Business School.

What I learned running the fellowship with O’Neill, Thiel, and others during its first three years is that America has lost sight of what it takes to produce new inventions and discoveries. That failure has led those who run major institutions to misjudge talent. The people running Harvard or the NSF—the architects of the “Great Scientific Stagnation”—think in terms of buying prestige: the number of papers published, the status of the journals in which they appear, citation counts, the reputations of endorsing professors, prior grants, grant size, university affiliation, and Ph.D. pedigree.

If you’re head of the NSF, responsible for managing more than $10 billion in federal spending to advance science, your goal should be to buy discoveries, not prestige. And to buy discoveries, you need to find and fund creative genius, wherever it turns up.

When I see universities like Johns Hopkins or the University of Pennsylvania collecting billions in grants each year, I see evidence of a flawed understanding of where discoveries come from. True, their scientists produce solid work and, at times, important theories, but are they worth the billions the government sends them? If the “Great Scientific Stagnation” thesis is right—and the evidence suggests it is—the answer is no.

Why aren’t Americans getting a better bang for their science buck? Grant-makers often overlook talent because of perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality, among others. The supposed defects of Thiel Fellows were their youth and lack of a college degree, yet those attributes proved irrelevant. Our job was to predict outcomes and take big risks; the results speak for themselves.

When O’Neill got the nod to lead the NSF, I texted to ask how I could help. “Send me your ideas,” he replied. Here are five.

First, the NSF should adopt the Thiel Fellowship model (or develop its own) for identifying young, overlooked, and therefore undervalued talent. The central challenge is improving selection while relying on less evidence. At the Thiel Fellowship, we built models that assessed the raw character of an engineer or scientist and translated it into an estimate of strengths and likely success.

I emphasize “young” because creativity is perishable. As with athletes, there is a prime age range when the mind is most fecund and sharp. One of American science’s key chokepoints is that institutions don’t trust younger researchers to do great work. The average age of first-time grant recipients is about 40 to 45; that should drop by two decades.

The economist Benjamin Jones’s research, spanning the past century, shows that innovators are reaching their greatest achievements at increasingly older ages. That might be fine if creativity and productivity remained constant over a lifetime—but they do not. Late starts mean shorter careers, resulting, by Jones’s estimate, in a 30 percent decline in the potential for new discoveries and inventions. By analogy, imagine how unimpressive career statistics would be if Major League Baseball barred players from competing until age 30. Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the four papers that revolutionized physics in 1905. Isaac Newton was 23 or 24 when he developed calculus and the theory of gravity. The NSF should be looking in these age ranges for tomorrow’s talent.

Second, the NSF must speed up the grant-review process. As it stands, it’s a circus. Multiple studies find that scientists spend 20 percent to 40 percent of their working hours preparing applications that have only about a one-in-five chance of success and take far too long to process. Endless peer-review rituals and elaborate decision procedures, neither of which improve outcomes, slow the pace of discovery.

We should accept a higher risk of flubs, blind alleys, and dead ends in exchange for a better shot at major breakthroughs. Two ideas are worth testing. One is a partial lottery: randomly select from applications that clear a quick initial screen. The other would be scout programs: recruit a rotating network of proven agents—working scientists, professors, independent thinkers—with firsthand knowledge of emerging talent. No interviews or prestige proxies. Give credentials near-zero weight. Scouts would simply select recipients, who wouldn’t even know they were being evaluated until the funding arrived. To avoid entrenched patronage, scouts would serve two-year terms and then pass their authority to a peer outside their immediate professional circle.

Third, measure what matters: the expected magnitude of discovery, not the expected number of citations. Create a “renegade scientist” grant program that explicitly rewards risky, interdisciplinary, even unconventional, proposals that peer review tends to kill. Pair it with a clear list of major unsolved problems that the grants are meant to tackle.

Fourth, use the NSF’s funding and authority to break the cartel of prestigious scientific journals. Taxpayers fund the research, only to have access sold back to them at exorbitant prices. The NSF should use its leverage to free that work from paywalled journals by requiring that all government-funded research be publicly accessible.

Fifth, fix the incentives. Cap or eliminate indirect-cost siphons to universities, especially those with endowments in the tens of billions. Fund people, not buildings. Today, if a university scientist wins a grant, the university claws back more than half of it for “indirect costs” or administrative overhead. This rake-off goes not to the actual business of scientific discovery but to salaries for DEI officers or planting flowers in the quad. The NSF should also require an “idiot index”—a comparison between a scientist’s estimate of an experiment’s cost and the university’s. The aim is to drive spending toward tools and lab space, not bureaucracy.

Do these five things, and the NSF will become the fire for American ingenuity instead of being a steward of stagnation. We have the money and the talent. What’s missing is the courage to stop buying prestige and start buying discoveries.

Jim O’Neill has spent his career proving he can spot that courage in others. Now he should get the shot to institutionalize it. The Senate should confirm him so the next chapter of revolutionary science can begin. As he wrote in an X post announcing his nomination, “Entropy is on the march and China is not waiting.”