Why Does DARPA Work?

Reasons are myriad.

100% of the PMs I've worked with had tenure and successful labs prior to becoming PMs, and went back to their institution & restarted their labs after leaving DARPA. The reason for leaving your lab to be PM is fairly obvious: controlling the funding gives you a lot of leverage for shaping the priorities of the field, in a way that merely running your own lab doesn't.

Maybe your division sucked. I've only ever worked with highly competent PMs, and all of the programs I've worked on ended in commercialization.

Anyways, prosecuting individual cases doesn't seem like a particularly good way of evaluating the effectiveness of an agency.

Think Uber: disrupting the Taxi business (or just regulations ...). Once something like Uber starts to work, a 'Vision Fund' takes this fledgling thing and backs it with billions to conquer the world.

It's not about moon-shots, it's about market power and speed on a global scale.

Like hyper-supercharged 'Round C or D' - instead of doing an initial public offering for cash, you take on massive cash from Vision.

Wether or not it will work is something else, but there's logic there.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-lawmakers-unveil-...

Certainly a timely article. I don't know whether it's a good thing or not. The DARPA model has certainly been productive, but it isn't suited for every research topic or subdiscipline.

As discussed in the article, currently NSF is the most open to basic science of funding agencies, and gives grantees the most latitude in what they work on. That is a valuable thing to have in the ecosystem.

If Congress expects the majority of publicly-funded research even from the NSF to be on short-term grants for specific visions and technologies, it will rule out working on a lot of important things.

That contrasts VERY strong with most govt contracting which is under allowable cost or cost reimbursement setups where the absolute most important criteria is to bill enough costs to draw contract in the right cost buckets (which can be super annoying if local agencies require super complicated budget mod processes).

In the cost based contracts, the focus really focuses on the accounting for the costs and other compliance related items. Ie, did you send someone to a conference with govt money, how can you prove you didn't use the govt money in this way or that way etc etc. Bam, welcome to personal activity reports with fund codes that no one understands (ie, major universities have an insane number of codes), and all the nightmares that follow including a fair bit of rule pending that even normally ethical folks find themselves being asked to to get through the paperwork.

Seriously, you deliver the product at 50% of cost? You will get a nasty note from the head of your agency saying make sure you draw full contract because agency budget depends on the indirect portion of this award (ie, 30% to overhead) and even the govt agency supervising (who also budgeted based on a cut of full contract) AND other folks for whom leftover money makes life difficult (harder to close contract etc) AND because a lot of govt funding is on the repeat what we did last year model so drawing down everything avoids a cut next year when you may really need it.

You determine it would be cheaper to do x vs y and that required a budget mod? Wait 1-2 months for commission approval if you even bother trying to fight it through (changes I don't know how the accounting for SBIRs etc work, but somehow those projects always seemed more results oriented (so a LOT more fun to work on, focus is on getting a solution going).