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Funding
Fiscal Sponsor
I agree that a pot of money for smaller grants, sub-$100K maybe, would do a lot of good.
A couple of other potential concerns:
First, NSF/NIH/whoever ends up with a lot more overhead from the selection process if they move to larger numbers of smaller awards. They'd have more awards to oversee and probably more proposals to review. No agency likes more work when the returns are harder to explain.
Second, from the point of view of an organization trying to make the case to Congress to get more funding, it probably looks a lot better to be handing big chunks of money to high-profile, blue-chip, high-probability-of-success projects, than to a bunch of little, maybe riskier projects. I personally think having lots of little, riskier experiments will pay off in the long run, but then again, I don't have to get grilled on the House floor every year about what I have done for them lately.
Any thoughts?