Last year, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which, besides shoring up the American semiconductor industry, also significantly increased federal spending on scientific research. Both the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation came away with substantial boosts. The “and Science” part of the bill comes from the Endless Frontier Act, a bipartisan proposal from early 2020 to boost public investment in research and development. Congress has also increased science funding through the ordinary appropriations process, including large bumps for another major research agency, the National Institutes of Health.

Preceding these legislative actions was a years-long — and still ongoing — debate on the Hill over how to ensure that the United States maintains its competitive advantage in science and innovation, especially against a rising China. This debate, like most science policy debates, was framed almost exclusively in terms of funding. How much money should we be spending on research? Who should spend it — the private or the public sector? If the public, then which government agency? Which constituency should get it — “basic” science or “applied” research and development? Each always lobbies for its own preferred outcome, while politicians bicker over whether we’re spending too much or too little.

Funding is of course necessary for science. Modern science is a large-scale and expensive endeavor. But funding is not sufficient for scientific progress. The scientific enterprise suffers from systemic problems that won’t be solved, and could even be made worse, by simply throwing more money at researchers. These problems include the failure to replicate key experimental findings (the so-called “replication crisis”), the prevalence of shoddy research practices, misaligned incentives, increasing bureaucratization, and the slowing of scientific progress.

In response to these problems, a number of key science agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have launched programs to reform funding mechanisms, incentivize breakthrough discoveries, reduce the administrative burden on researchers, and link research to real-world outcomes. These are promising developments for improving federal science as well as the larger research enterprise.

But reforms aimed at spurring scientific progress will be shots in the dark without a clear conception of what scientific progress is. Unless we are explicit about what we mean by scientific progress, we will fail to see the tradeoffs between different conceptions of it and the particular kinds of reform they each require. Worse, the wrong kind of reform may even achieve the opposite of what we intend.

Read the entire essay at The New Atlantis