U.K. science minister says DARPA-like agency is in the works

There are a few things to note here:

1. Because the funding body doesn’t exist, it can be described fit whatever characteristics the government chooses, whether or not they could actually create such a body.

2. Because of the current state of the government, this should really be looked at more like an election promise than an actual proposal. In particular the government can’t really pass any legislation at the moment and will likely go into an election soon.

3. On the other hand it seems like a weird election promise. I think most voters don’t particularly care about science funding and surely almost all of them won’t know about DARPA or ARPA. So maybe it’s trying to persuade scientists to stay in the uk. Or maybe it’s a new minister trying to make his mark. Or maybe it really is just the plan for how the government want to do research. Or maybe it’s targeted at academics who hate the bureaucracy of grant applications.

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My understanding of the current research funding organisations is that they require a huge amount of work to be done by academics on grant proposals and on further bureaucracy during the research. (In particular there are more proposals than there is money so one must write the best proposal one can to place highly. Also because of the limited funds in the budget, the funding body wants enough paperwork to get its money’s worth). My understanding of typical military funding in the US is that they give good money but they require frequent evidence of actual results. They also mainly want to find things with reasonable applications to the military. My understanding of (D)ARPA is that they threw money at various projects with reasonably to very broad research proposals, often in basic science, hoping something good would come out of it.

I’m not sure how well a DARPA model would work across all research in the uk. There are lots of fields and they are different in what and how they research. It feels like lots of people could lose out on basically any funding. And so we would lose out on their research.

On the other hand the incentives for researchers (to spend all their time on grant applications) aren’t great. One weird suggestion I see from time to time is to put all grant proposals into either a good enough or not good enough bucket, and then somehow randomly allocate grants between the good proposals.

Cummings blog is worth a read. The content is not very political beyond a key refrain that nearly all current political structures, processes and people aren’t fit for purpose for the modern world and especially the future. For what it’s worth, I voted remain.