Are NIH grants secretly person-based funding?

There was a good back-and-forth on NIH funding in the Good Science Project last week. Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck first made the case that science funders would benefit from adopting some VC-style practices, then former NIGMS director Jeremy Berg responded. The most interesting disagreement — whether grantees are functionally locked into their original grant scope, or have flexibility to adjust relatively nimbly — highlighted how useful these exchanges can be. Berg clarified that, in practice, researchers can and do follow the science where it leads without bureaucratic pre-approval. Pair that with the common observation that researchers often apply for projects they’ve effectively already completed so they can use the funds for the next thing, and R01s start to look more like “person-based funding” than the metascience community gives them credit for. Of course, that’s not to say expansion of actual person-based funding is not worthwhile! But we have limited bandwidth to push for large-scale reforms; exchanges like this help us figure out where the system is actually stuck vs where it’s perhaps working better than some think.