How the NSF Moved Faster than the NIH During COVID-19

The NSF is a much smaller organization than the NIH but during the pandemic it moved more quickly. Why? Maxwell Tabarrok explains:

The NSF relied on its special congressional authority to skip peer review to bootstrap its pandemic-related granting. Two pre-existing programs which use this authority enabled the NSF’s speedy response. The RAPID (Rapid Response Research) and EAGER (EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) programs focus on “proposals having a severe urgency,” and “exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas,” respectively. Both turn applications around quickly: while typical federal science grants take 9-12 months of review, RAPID and EAGER grants usually provide funding to researchers in less than a month.

…The NSF funded valuable research through its RAPID grants program, including the development of the first COVID-19 test to get FDA approval, the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data dashboard, and both inhaled and micro-needle patch vaccines, the latter of which is currently being scaled up for use in HPV vaccines. These examples don’t conclusively show that the NSF avoided sacrificing quality control for speed, but they suggest that the NSF’s internal team of reviewers funded multiple effective projects that benefited from faster turnarounds. The benefits of speeding up these big successes when they were urgently needed outweighed the hypothetical costs of approving some below-average projects.

In crises generally, the success of a science funder is determined by its biggest wins, not by the average quality of the projects it approves. Science’s impact on the pandemic was dominated by a single technology: the mRNA vaccine. The next most important contributions, likely testing or pharmaceutical treatments, were less important than the vaccine, and the average COVID-19 research project may have had minimal impact. External peer review slows down the funding of all projects to make sure that low-quality research is not funded. This kind of bottom-end quality control is less important in a crisis environment. At crisis-response margins, it’s probably better for science funding agencies to anchor less on quality control and instead take more shots on goal.

The NIH, to be fair, also responded more rapidly than usual and it used some special “shark-tank” like programs to do so which also worked well.

Read the whole thing for more recommendations.