One of the current hot topics is the Trump administration’s supposedly anti-scientific stance for deciding to cancel some grants. A poll shows many scientists thinking about leaving the country as a result.

In today’s Martin Center article, Professor John Staddon argues that at least some of the research the feds have been paying for is useless.

He writes:

Perhaps a third of federal funding seems to go not to actual science but to projects that are frankly political. A couple of years ago, for example, two ladies at Duke University got a $9.9-million grant entitled (in part) “A Collective Impact Approach to Broadening Participation in Computing,” basically an effort to get more women into computer science. This was part of a much larger NSF program along similar lines.

Lots of researchers have figured out how to game the system by proposing projects that reflect leftist obsessions such as “diversity.”

This reminds me of a book I reviewed many years ago, Terence Kealey’s The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, where he argued that we should leave the funding of research to people and groups that are putting up their own money.