Congress should create a new White House entity to oversee and simplify regulations on federally sponsored academic research. That recommendation comes from Optimizing the Nation’s Investment in Academic Research, an interim report by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The new entity, a policy board, would be populated by officials from research universities and would strive to make application requirements for research funding more uniform, more effective, and less duplicative.
As one example, the board would consider instituting common grant applications and financial conflict-of-interest disclosures. It would report to a newly created associate director position at the Office of Science and Technology Policy and to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Over the past decade, the acceptance rates for research proposals at NSF and the National Institutes of Health have reached historic lows; in 2014 they...
