I recently applied for a grant for which my collaborators and I had to detail our plan for broadening participation in computing. We had to pledge to be involved in “high school math contests for women and gender minorities,” gathered data on demographics of students served by these, participate in summer research programs for undergraduates from under-represented groups, again collecting demographics and running our own little sociological analyses, and pledge to go to extreme efforts to recruit women grad students. Three pages of this stuff! I just want to work with my colleagues and do research; I don’t want to have to adhere to someone else’s social justice agenda as part of getting funding for research. (Whether I agree with the agenda or not, I don’t want it tied to funding for scientific endeavors.)
I’m so glad you wrote out all the steps we academics go through to maybe receive federal funding. Folks need to know what these processes are like.
I'm curious: Was this demanded/suggested by NSF or was it your (one of your's, if it's a multi-college proposal) grant offices suggesting it? Because I've never seen such things being demanded by NSF solicitations in maths, but I know of enough successful proposals that included such language (and got axed for that by DOGE now...) that I've been wondering whether it has been a hidden requirement or it is something that university grant offices push their faculty to put on their proposals.
During my fifty years working at a university, the requirements for research became ever more onerous. Working in the social sciences with human subjects, I was, toward the end of that period, subject to "ethics" bureaucrats who would judge applications and give or withhold their permission to submit a grant application or to continue with the research project. Exactly what political criteria were used to decide on a project's merits was not always made clear, but political correctness seemed paramount. But these administrative bureaucrats seemed to savour putting the professors in their (subordinate) place. At the end of my time, each researcher was required to take an on-line ethics course, filled with politically correct and far left "ethics," which, without having passed, you could not receive permission for your project. One of the rules was, you cannot impose any tasks on an unwilling member of your research team or subject group, although that is exactly what the requirement for the ethics test did with the RI.
In recent decades, NSF grants have been used as a litmus test for the ability of faculty to get funding precisely because the process is so complicated now. If I can show funding from other sources that is more than sufficient to support my research, I am told that for promotion purposes I should have obtained it from NSF - spend more time to get a taxpayer-funded grant so it looks that I am as capable as others to navigate the bureaucratic machine you describe.
In our old country (USSR), it was the other extreme - if you were a member of the Academy of Sciences, you received everything you needed as long as the first line of your proposal or publication described how your research fits the goals of the current presidium meeting of the communist party. Today, I am looking back at the grant-seeking process of even the early 2000s with fond nostalgia!
I have the feeling that my department would be more impressed with me finding a pot of money somewhere new than with an NSF grant. But it doesn't seem like there are lot of pots of moneys for pure maths in America...
You hit the nail on the head in what you wrote: "American science is dying from bureaucracy." Everyoneone I have talked to agrees. WHat they do not agree with is: "Yet, I also see an opportunity to address a deeper systemic problem plaguing science...and if the DOGE crew can channel their energy into yanking science from the grip of this malady, we will all end up in a better place." When I ask colleagues what they would do to imporive science, they all look like deers in headlights.
Thanks for writing this, and sharing your bureauocratic load with us--I appreciate the evidence!
Smart grad students and postdocs notice the hideous bureaucracy and notice their mentor overwhelmed by it. Those smart ones leave academia. The rest apply for faculty jobs.
Add to the above: those of us who do not need research grants for our research still have to go through the process of submitting grant proposals that will likely never be funded to show that we are making an effort to acquire funding.
Anna, I reached the conclusion long ago that the entire purpose of all this red tape is to create make-work jobs for otherwise unemployable bureaucrats.
The tapeworms have taken over the host, and now that somebody is (clumsily or deftly, depending on one's POV) at least _attempting_ to deworm the host, the parasites cry foul about "killing science".
BTW, I told Israeli and European colleagues about the extortionate levels of overhead US universities levy on NSF etc. grants. They couldn't believe their ears. 15% or 20% are the norm there, not 50+%.
About IRBs. (Which are the first step and must be submitted to FDA for an investigational new drug or device IND). People die pretty regularly in clinical trials. Sometimes it is caused by the trial. Sometimes it is unknown why.
The regulations are there for good reason. Scientists have committed atrocities. (More than you think. Read the linked paper.) I have written several IRBs and IND applications. I have gotten approved for some pretty risky things. I did it by addressing those risks and putting together a mitigation plan. If you do not get so much as an IRB, and technically, if you don't get an IND, or you don't disclose risks that you knew about, this can be proven, and someone dies or is horribly harmed? That paperwork was your get out of jail free card---And that ship has sailed love.
Now you are going to be arrested, charged with homicide, and plea bargain down to manslaughter if you are smart and don't go to trial. If you go to trial it's almost certain you will lose. You didn't do that regulatory stuff that has been around longer than anything else, and it was wilful. Slam dunk.
I know. It happened to a good friend. If you do it across state lines, it's going to be the FBI and those guys do not screw around. After the FBI is done, local prosecutors are going to take their wack at you because those cases are cheap slam-dunks that pump up their stats nicely. When you get out of Federal prison, you'll go to serve your sentence in state prison, quite possibly in both states. So, you take that plea bargain with probation and you are grateful for it. You will report to your probation officer, and every traffic stop becomes a potential one-way ticket to prison.
She was a soft touch, head of department. She didn't have the paperwork even started. The person she treated (who begged for it) died within half an hour. Lost job, lost license, teen kids acted out, and one died. Lost house. Lost husband. All of her colleagues she considered friends cut her out of their lives, except one. (I reviewed everything. I did not think it was related. It was a stroke, and that happens.)
I am also familiar with grants.gov. I agree on most of this. But for IRBs and INDs, no. That you pay attention to, and you do it. You do it so that people don't die unnecessarily. And you do it so that you don't wind up a felon. I could write an article on this.
Here is a good paper about IRBs and FDA that I like. Pretty recent. Pirate version.
I did not argue that IRBs are not necessary. But they morphed into something way different from the original intent. There is a detailed paper based on the panel discussion at our Censorship in the Sciences conference coming up, which documents it and proposes a solution.
Look, we could exempt the social sciences (which Congress never intended to need IRBs) and many other things. I'm on my IRB. The people are really nice. Only two of 12 members want to prevent research. Everyone else means well, but we routinely delay research for months (which really hurts grad students and junior faculty---talk about inequity) either due to regular backups or for compliance reasons, that everyone agrees up front, do not affect safety. We recently spent 90 minutes (counting our salaries maybe $1,100 in public money) for the protocols for a wine tasting that a professor had been doing for 10 years without incident with an amount of wine that is safe (7 ounces which you are instructed to spit out). This sort of thing does not increase trust in government, either among professors or taxpayers. So for medical stuff, sure, do an IRB. Let the rest of our people go!
That wine tasting should already be exempt. Are you up on the latest regulatory changes? There are quite a few canards floating around in the academic punch bowl.
For instance, it is not true that an IRB cannot examine a study retroactively and approve what was done. An IRB can do that, and it's fine. There is a lot of ignorance of the why and history.
Most of the insane IRB enforcement in academia is done by journals. They require box-checking, and the faceless referees who do not know the regs invent "non-compliant" bullshit. I have had that happen, even when I had the IRB approval number right there in the paper. A faceless referee wrote, "This investigation clearly did not have permission to perform this study." And that was that. No appeal, no recourse. I tried to correspond with the EIC, who would not respond to me. I wrote to the ombudsman for Elsevier. Unlike Springer, the Elsevier ombudsman was a complete waste of a good chair.
When a Springer journal did not respond to my complaints to the EIC and editorial board about a racist, mocking, review that attacked the concept of using mathematics in biology, the Springer Ombudsman shut down the journal permanently. I had more respect for Springer after that. I've had criticisms of Springer-Nature for profiteering. But at least they have some integrity and take action in egregious instances.
This inventive declaration ex cathedra by a referee was in biological sciences, for a study that was exempt. We got an IRB anyway, and because we were going through that, we got an IRB that approved injections, blood draws, etcetera. Our IRB was way, way past the requirements for a passive data-collection study.
If you want to make a meaningful change, go after the journal check-box bros.
PS - The social sciences inclusion IIRC, was due to the Stanford Experiment. The LSD study with sociopath killers in prison was another. That one had prisoners tied back to back on high doses of LSD for days. The result was an increase in recidivism, almost double normal IIRC.
There should be more education on history. People tend to get on IRBs without really knowing much and having and often foggy or just wrong ideas. And of course there are the petty tyrant types. Always those.
I was a PI back in the dark ages, between 1979 and 1990. It was so different back then it is amazing. I had funding from ONR, DARPA, AFOSR, DOE and Canada's National Research Council (NRC). Then I headed to corporate research at Bell Labs' Math Center and finally a mathematics think tank (after a few years at Princeton, to give academia one last chance).
I did notice during various interviews when I was applying for academic positions, that some of the universities were almost horrified that I was not getting money from NSF. For some stupid reason, this was viewed as a "gold standard". None of the characters interviewing me had NSF funding either, so it was sort of ridiculous.
In my area, knowing some of the funding officers at NSF, this is almost laughable. These funding officers were and are the most stupid of the stupid people in my field. They could not land any other positions, so they became NSF funding officers.
In the end I obtained about 6 or 7 faculty offers. The offers were so awful that I was offended. I turned them all down. I was literally insulted at the low quality of the offers. And salary was not and is not an important criterion for me.
Since then, living on the outskirts of DC, I have attended numerous lectures about securing private grants and contracts from the government and foundations, and setting up nonprofit organizations. One of the most amazing lectures I sat in was a 3 hour description of what it would take to be awarded an HHS grant.
I was the only person in the audience who had no interest in applying for an HHS grant, being a quantitative physical scientist. I was just there out of curiosity. The others in attendance had all obtained HHS funding before, or were attempting to get HHS funding. There were about 40 people in the lecture.
It was an incredible and nightmarish presentation. I could not believe what I was hearing. People in the room were literally in tears, or on the verge of tears, because the process sounded so awful. My own estimation, from what I heard, is that it might take a minimum of 3 to 5 years, for a team of 5 to 10, to obtain any money out of HHS for R&D or any other purposes.
I thought that if we operated like this in other parts of STEM, literally NOTHING would ever get done. Period. It would just be an endless paper chase with zero results. The bureaucracy is so overgrown in HHS that apparently almost nothing there operates properly any more. We saw the fruits of this during the pandemic. It is astounding in its byzantine complexity and non-functionality.
I have also listened to lectures by General John Hyten, former vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about military R&D and procurement. Apparently, according to Hyten, about 1970 there was a conscious decision in the Pentagon to retrain all their funding officers. The goal was to drag everything out and clutter it with bureaucracy. My guess is that to satisfy Congress, they wanted to create LOTS more meaningless jobs in various districts.
One example Hyten gave was some program that cost 500 units a year, steadily for many years. And to make sure those 500 units were not "wasted", another bureaucracy was created to oversee the technical people spending those 500 units a year. This administrative bureaucracy cost 1500 units a year, and impeded the work of the original group that cost 500 units a year. And to make sure none of those 500 units was wasted, the Pentagon in its infinite wisdom was willing to spend far more money to check and double check. And in addition, as a bonus, the 500 units a year then was not enough to comply with all the bureaucratic oversight and nonsense.
So we have many more programs that are years or even decades overdue now, and way over budget. But, Congress is happy, because to them, this waste and overspending is all gravy for them.
Can we get back to more rational funding models and organizing principles? It is not clear. But it would be nice.
Academia today is like a garden being either overgrown and choked to death by bureaucratic weeds or trampled by herds of woke lunatics. Every day I am thankful that I am emeritus.
Great article. On a related note I wonder if years of admin micromanaging of faculty and treating them like children is one factor in the petulant, performative and plain unserious behavior we’ve seen many faculty and faculty senates engage in over the past couple of years?
Since we are reminiscing about the Past, I'll share some memories that my former European colleagues told me about how science was done back in the day... Apparently, each Professor was more or less guaranteed funding for couple Students, whilst most of the grant applications were taken care of by their Chair. This is especially important for fundamental research: Academics need focus their intellect on science rather than on "business"!
The bureaucracy you describe must be worse at certain state universities, but is approaching this level at private institutions as well. The key point is that it hasn't prevented a lot of problems that we see with scientific funding today. On the superficial level, some scientists do still engage in borderline amounts of too-fancy travel and too-fancy meals -- probably allowed but not always ethical. On the deeper level, none of this ensures that research fields police themselves for quality. Certain subfields have become completely siloed into small communities that keep approving funding for each other despite declining quality. Even in more vibrant subfields, there are many successfully funded proposals that rehash known ideas and don't show a clear benefit to taxpayers or even to scientific or technological progress.
I recently applied for a grant for which my collaborators and I had to detail our plan for broadening participation in computing. We had to pledge to be involved in “high school math contests for women and gender minorities,” gathered data on demographics of students served by these, participate in summer research programs for undergraduates from under-represented groups, again collecting demographics and running our own little sociological analyses, and pledge to go to extreme efforts to recruit women grad students. Three pages of this stuff! I just want to work with my colleagues and do research; I don’t want to have to adhere to someone else’s social justice agenda as part of getting funding for research. (Whether I agree with the agenda or not, I don’t want it tied to funding for scientific endeavors.)
I’m so glad you wrote out all the steps we academics go through to maybe receive federal funding. Folks need to know what these processes are like.
I'm curious: Was this demanded/suggested by NSF or was it your (one of your's, if it's a multi-college proposal) grant offices suggesting it? Because I've never seen such things being demanded by NSF solicitations in maths, but I know of enough successful proposals that included such language (and got axed for that by DOGE now...) that I've been wondering whether it has been a hidden requirement or it is something that university grant offices push their faculty to put on their proposals.
This was a requirement of the theoretical or mathematical part of the computer science division of NSF. We applied in the fall of 2024.
During my fifty years working at a university, the requirements for research became ever more onerous. Working in the social sciences with human subjects, I was, toward the end of that period, subject to "ethics" bureaucrats who would judge applications and give or withhold their permission to submit a grant application or to continue with the research project. Exactly what political criteria were used to decide on a project's merits was not always made clear, but political correctness seemed paramount. But these administrative bureaucrats seemed to savour putting the professors in their (subordinate) place. At the end of my time, each researcher was required to take an on-line ethics course, filled with politically correct and far left "ethics," which, without having passed, you could not receive permission for your project. One of the rules was, you cannot impose any tasks on an unwilling member of your research team or subject group, although that is exactly what the requirement for the ethics test did with the RI.
Excellent summary, Anna!
In recent decades, NSF grants have been used as a litmus test for the ability of faculty to get funding precisely because the process is so complicated now. If I can show funding from other sources that is more than sufficient to support my research, I am told that for promotion purposes I should have obtained it from NSF - spend more time to get a taxpayer-funded grant so it looks that I am as capable as others to navigate the bureaucratic machine you describe.
In our old country (USSR), it was the other extreme - if you were a member of the Academy of Sciences, you received everything you needed as long as the first line of your proposal or publication described how your research fits the goals of the current presidium meeting of the communist party. Today, I am looking back at the grant-seeking process of even the early 2000s with fond nostalgia!
I have the feeling that my department would be more impressed with me finding a pot of money somewhere new than with an NSF grant. But it doesn't seem like there are lot of pots of moneys for pure maths in America...
Treat faculty as adults?!?! Now you’re really crossing the line!
Great article Anna. Extremely useful.
Dear Anna,
You hit the nail on the head in what you wrote: "American science is dying from bureaucracy." Everyoneone I have talked to agrees. WHat they do not agree with is: "Yet, I also see an opportunity to address a deeper systemic problem plaguing science...and if the DOGE crew can channel their energy into yanking science from the grip of this malady, we will all end up in a better place." When I ask colleagues what they would do to imporive science, they all look like deers in headlights.
Thanks for writing this, and sharing your bureauocratic load with us--I appreciate the evidence!
Thanks,
randy
Smart grad students and postdocs notice the hideous bureaucracy and notice their mentor overwhelmed by it. Those smart ones leave academia. The rest apply for faculty jobs.
Add to the above: those of us who do not need research grants for our research still have to go through the process of submitting grant proposals that will likely never be funded to show that we are making an effort to acquire funding.
Anna, I reached the conclusion long ago that the entire purpose of all this red tape is to create make-work jobs for otherwise unemployable bureaucrats.
The tapeworms have taken over the host, and now that somebody is (clumsily or deftly, depending on one's POV) at least _attempting_ to deworm the host, the parasites cry foul about "killing science".
BTW, I told Israeli and European colleagues about the extortionate levels of overhead US universities levy on NSF etc. grants. They couldn't believe their ears. 15% or 20% are the norm there, not 50+%.
About IRBs. (Which are the first step and must be submitted to FDA for an investigational new drug or device IND). People die pretty regularly in clinical trials. Sometimes it is caused by the trial. Sometimes it is unknown why.
The regulations are there for good reason. Scientists have committed atrocities. (More than you think. Read the linked paper.) I have written several IRBs and IND applications. I have gotten approved for some pretty risky things. I did it by addressing those risks and putting together a mitigation plan. If you do not get so much as an IRB, and technically, if you don't get an IND, or you don't disclose risks that you knew about, this can be proven, and someone dies or is horribly harmed? That paperwork was your get out of jail free card---And that ship has sailed love.
Now you are going to be arrested, charged with homicide, and plea bargain down to manslaughter if you are smart and don't go to trial. If you go to trial it's almost certain you will lose. You didn't do that regulatory stuff that has been around longer than anything else, and it was wilful. Slam dunk.
I know. It happened to a good friend. If you do it across state lines, it's going to be the FBI and those guys do not screw around. After the FBI is done, local prosecutors are going to take their wack at you because those cases are cheap slam-dunks that pump up their stats nicely. When you get out of Federal prison, you'll go to serve your sentence in state prison, quite possibly in both states. So, you take that plea bargain with probation and you are grateful for it. You will report to your probation officer, and every traffic stop becomes a potential one-way ticket to prison.
She was a soft touch, head of department. She didn't have the paperwork even started. The person she treated (who begged for it) died within half an hour. Lost job, lost license, teen kids acted out, and one died. Lost house. Lost husband. All of her colleagues she considered friends cut her out of their lives, except one. (I reviewed everything. I did not think it was related. It was a stroke, and that happens.)
I am also familiar with grants.gov. I agree on most of this. But for IRBs and INDs, no. That you pay attention to, and you do it. You do it so that people don't die unnecessarily. And you do it so that you don't wind up a felon. I could write an article on this.
Here is a good paper about IRBs and FDA that I like. Pretty recent. Pirate version.
https://gwern.net/doc/nootropic/quantified-self/2019-hanley.pdf
I did not argue that IRBs are not necessary. But they morphed into something way different from the original intent. There is a detailed paper based on the panel discussion at our Censorship in the Sciences conference coming up, which documents it and proposes a solution.
Look, we could exempt the social sciences (which Congress never intended to need IRBs) and many other things. I'm on my IRB. The people are really nice. Only two of 12 members want to prevent research. Everyone else means well, but we routinely delay research for months (which really hurts grad students and junior faculty---talk about inequity) either due to regular backups or for compliance reasons, that everyone agrees up front, do not affect safety. We recently spent 90 minutes (counting our salaries maybe $1,100 in public money) for the protocols for a wine tasting that a professor had been doing for 10 years without incident with an amount of wine that is safe (7 ounces which you are instructed to spit out). This sort of thing does not increase trust in government, either among professors or taxpayers. So for medical stuff, sure, do an IRB. Let the rest of our people go!
That wine tasting should already be exempt. Are you up on the latest regulatory changes? There are quite a few canards floating around in the academic punch bowl.
For instance, it is not true that an IRB cannot examine a study retroactively and approve what was done. An IRB can do that, and it's fine. There is a lot of ignorance of the why and history.
Most of the insane IRB enforcement in academia is done by journals. They require box-checking, and the faceless referees who do not know the regs invent "non-compliant" bullshit. I have had that happen, even when I had the IRB approval number right there in the paper. A faceless referee wrote, "This investigation clearly did not have permission to perform this study." And that was that. No appeal, no recourse. I tried to correspond with the EIC, who would not respond to me. I wrote to the ombudsman for Elsevier. Unlike Springer, the Elsevier ombudsman was a complete waste of a good chair.
When a Springer journal did not respond to my complaints to the EIC and editorial board about a racist, mocking, review that attacked the concept of using mathematics in biology, the Springer Ombudsman shut down the journal permanently. I had more respect for Springer after that. I've had criticisms of Springer-Nature for profiteering. But at least they have some integrity and take action in egregious instances.
This inventive declaration ex cathedra by a referee was in biological sciences, for a study that was exempt. We got an IRB anyway, and because we were going through that, we got an IRB that approved injections, blood draws, etcetera. Our IRB was way, way past the requirements for a passive data-collection study.
If you want to make a meaningful change, go after the journal check-box bros.
PS - The social sciences inclusion IIRC, was due to the Stanford Experiment. The LSD study with sociopath killers in prison was another. That one had prisoners tied back to back on high doses of LSD for days. The result was an increase in recidivism, almost double normal IIRC.
There should be more education on history. People tend to get on IRBs without really knowing much and having and often foggy or just wrong ideas. And of course there are the petty tyrant types. Always those.
I was a PI back in the dark ages, between 1979 and 1990. It was so different back then it is amazing. I had funding from ONR, DARPA, AFOSR, DOE and Canada's National Research Council (NRC). Then I headed to corporate research at Bell Labs' Math Center and finally a mathematics think tank (after a few years at Princeton, to give academia one last chance).
I did notice during various interviews when I was applying for academic positions, that some of the universities were almost horrified that I was not getting money from NSF. For some stupid reason, this was viewed as a "gold standard". None of the characters interviewing me had NSF funding either, so it was sort of ridiculous.
In my area, knowing some of the funding officers at NSF, this is almost laughable. These funding officers were and are the most stupid of the stupid people in my field. They could not land any other positions, so they became NSF funding officers.
In the end I obtained about 6 or 7 faculty offers. The offers were so awful that I was offended. I turned them all down. I was literally insulted at the low quality of the offers. And salary was not and is not an important criterion for me.
Since then, living on the outskirts of DC, I have attended numerous lectures about securing private grants and contracts from the government and foundations, and setting up nonprofit organizations. One of the most amazing lectures I sat in was a 3 hour description of what it would take to be awarded an HHS grant.
I was the only person in the audience who had no interest in applying for an HHS grant, being a quantitative physical scientist. I was just there out of curiosity. The others in attendance had all obtained HHS funding before, or were attempting to get HHS funding. There were about 40 people in the lecture.
It was an incredible and nightmarish presentation. I could not believe what I was hearing. People in the room were literally in tears, or on the verge of tears, because the process sounded so awful. My own estimation, from what I heard, is that it might take a minimum of 3 to 5 years, for a team of 5 to 10, to obtain any money out of HHS for R&D or any other purposes.
I thought that if we operated like this in other parts of STEM, literally NOTHING would ever get done. Period. It would just be an endless paper chase with zero results. The bureaucracy is so overgrown in HHS that apparently almost nothing there operates properly any more. We saw the fruits of this during the pandemic. It is astounding in its byzantine complexity and non-functionality.
I have also listened to lectures by General John Hyten, former vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about military R&D and procurement. Apparently, according to Hyten, about 1970 there was a conscious decision in the Pentagon to retrain all their funding officers. The goal was to drag everything out and clutter it with bureaucracy. My guess is that to satisfy Congress, they wanted to create LOTS more meaningless jobs in various districts.
One example Hyten gave was some program that cost 500 units a year, steadily for many years. And to make sure those 500 units were not "wasted", another bureaucracy was created to oversee the technical people spending those 500 units a year. This administrative bureaucracy cost 1500 units a year, and impeded the work of the original group that cost 500 units a year. And to make sure none of those 500 units was wasted, the Pentagon in its infinite wisdom was willing to spend far more money to check and double check. And in addition, as a bonus, the 500 units a year then was not enough to comply with all the bureaucratic oversight and nonsense.
So we have many more programs that are years or even decades overdue now, and way over budget. But, Congress is happy, because to them, this waste and overspending is all gravy for them.
Can we get back to more rational funding models and organizing principles? It is not clear. But it would be nice.
Academia today is like a garden being either overgrown and choked to death by bureaucratic weeds or trampled by herds of woke lunatics. Every day I am thankful that I am emeritus.
Brava! I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all of your proposal instantly come true.
Great article. On a related note I wonder if years of admin micromanaging of faculty and treating them like children is one factor in the petulant, performative and plain unserious behavior we’ve seen many faculty and faculty senates engage in over the past couple of years?
Since we are reminiscing about the Past, I'll share some memories that my former European colleagues told me about how science was done back in the day... Apparently, each Professor was more or less guaranteed funding for couple Students, whilst most of the grant applications were taken care of by their Chair. This is especially important for fundamental research: Academics need focus their intellect on science rather than on "business"!
That must have been a while ago, though -- try writing a grant proposal for someone in a different discipline...
The bureaucracy you describe must be worse at certain state universities, but is approaching this level at private institutions as well. The key point is that it hasn't prevented a lot of problems that we see with scientific funding today. On the superficial level, some scientists do still engage in borderline amounts of too-fancy travel and too-fancy meals -- probably allowed but not always ethical. On the deeper level, none of this ensures that research fields police themselves for quality. Certain subfields have become completely siloed into small communities that keep approving funding for each other despite declining quality. Even in more vibrant subfields, there are many successfully funded proposals that rehash known ideas and don't show a clear benefit to taxpayers or even to scientific or technological progress.