Investing in the National Research Initiative: An Update of the Competitive Grants Program in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1994)

In Investing in Research: A Proposal to Strengthen the Agricultural, Food, and Environmental System (National Research Council, 1989), the Board on Agriculture identified three major challenges facing the nation's agricultural sector. First, the competitive position of the United States, and particularly its food and fiber industries, would erode in a liberalized trading environment in the absence of market expansion and increases in productivity (i.e., gains in output achieved with fewer inputs). Second, an abundant and safe food supply of high nutritional quality would contribute significantly to the promotion of the health of the U.S. population and to the prevention of disease. Third, the imperative to protect and enhance the quality of the nation's natural resources had to be met at lowest cost to producers and consumers. The board finds these challenges no less compelling in 1994 than in 1989 and believes that success in meeting them depends in large measure on an adequate understanding of the fundamental processes of food and fiber production.

Five years ago, the board, in Investing in Research, recommended that

• the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) investment in research should be increased to include a competitive grants program funded at $500 million annually,
• the grant program's scope should encompass six broad areas of endeavor, and
• awards should be made using four different types of grants.

The six areas of research were to include (1) plant systems; (2) animal systems; (3) nutrition, food quality, and health; (4) natural resources and the environment; (5) engineering, products, and processes; and (6) markets, trade, and policy. The four grant types were to include those to (1) individual investigators, (2) multidisciplinary teams of investigators conducting fundamental research at the intersection of disciplines, (3) multidisciplinary teams pursuing mission-linked research, and (4) institutions and individuals whose research capacity could be strengthened.

Competitive grants are not the only means by which agricultural research can or should be supported. Federal intramural agricultural research, state formula funding of agricultural research, and special grants to specific institutions for narrowly detined uses are three other parts of the USDA research program portfolio. However, the board believes competitive grants are best suited to stimulating new fundamental research activities in specific areas of science. Compared to other mechanisms, competitive grants have three major strengths that work toward attainment of the goal of stimulating advancement in fundamental areas of science, thus advancing the frontier that defines the possibilities for technological innovation.

1. Competitive grants are responsive and flexible, permitting participation of leading-edge scientists as applicants and also as proposal reviewers and allowing adjustment in year-to-year funding priorities as scientific opportunity and national need dictate.
2. Such grants can attract a broad range of scientists (from public and private, agricultural and nonagricultural institutions) to the agricultural, food, and natural-resource system, drawing talent into new endeavors and into research on unresolved problems.
3. This grant program casts a wide net that captures research proposals that will aid in developing new alliances, new initiatives, and new approaches complementary to those traditionally employed.

Contributions that are the result of competitive grants have been documented in other areas of science. Other federal agencies with strong records in meeting national needs, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), allocate more than 80 percent of research expenditures to competitive grants (National Research Council, 1994a). In contrast, competitive grants currently comprise less than 10 percent of USDA's research expenditures. The applied, regional, and site-specific nature of many food, agricultural, and environmental research and engineering issues makes it appropriate for a sizable portion of agricultural research funding to continue moving into the system through federal and state formula funds and other non-competitive means. Clearly, there remains considerable scope for expansion of the use of competitive grants at USDA, and, equally important, of the use of peer review.

Adopted first in the president's budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 1991, the board's recommendations in Investing in Research were subsequently incorporated into the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990 (the 1990 farm bill) as the National Initiative for Research in Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (NRI). Congressional appropriators responded to the administration's initial request for $100 million by increasing the previous year's allocation of $42.5 million to $73 million. The next year, the administration sought to add $50 million in an attempt to reach the eventual goal of a $500-million program. The NRI received $97.5 million in that year, and the amount has not increased significantly despite both the Bush and Clinton administrations' requests for funding at considerably higher levels. The design of the NRI, as recommended by the board and embodied in the farm bill, envisions a sophisticated use of innovative grants deployed across a broad spectrum of science. Consequently, the scale of the NRI's operation directly determines the scope of the research endeavor. Given that the NRI program level has hovered at about $100 million for the past 4 years, the opportunities envisioned for it have yet to be realized.

In response to the apparent stagnation in the growth of the NRI and to take stock of the experience with the NRI to date, the Board on Agriculture convened a forum in October 1993 attended by scientists and representatives from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. Although the board believed it was too soon to conduct a detailed or comprehensive evaluation of the NRI, it sought a range of opinions on the NRI's management and goals as a way of conducting informed deliberations on the possibilities for continued enhancement of the NRI. The board has taken particular note of the impediments to the NRI's growth, or the aspects of program management that might warrant strengthening, and of its support for national goals for agricultural research.

In restating its 1989 recommendation, the board notes that USDA research funding has grown from $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion in the intervening years. Even raising the target for competitive grants would be consistent with the board's goal of enlarging the significance of competitive grants in the overall USDA research portfolio. The original proposal would have approximately one-third of USDA research funds devoted to competitive grants, a proportion still well below that of NIH and NSF.

In Investing in Research, the board endorsed the need to reduce the federal budget deficit as a precondition for maintaining the health of the general economy on which the food and fiber sector depends. It suggested not only that

reductions in spending on the Depression-era commodity price supports might be directed to deficit reduction but also that a portion of the savings should be invested in research. Federal outlays for these subsidies are projected to amount to $12 billion in FY 1994 and $8.5 billion in FY 1995 (Agricultural Outlook, 1994). Adherence to international trade agreements negotiated since 1989 implies the need to reduce spending further on commodity subsidies that distort markets. What better way to equip farmers to respond to market signals than to improve the efficiency of their operations? That is the fundamental reason to expand the NRI aggressively.

NRI managers have improved all aspects of the program's operation, from identification of critical research areas to composition of peer review panels. Several opportunities now exist, however, to make the NRI more accountable, effective, and relevant.

Although efforts must continue throughout the life of the program, particular attention should be paid now, as the NRI approaches the threshold of what the board hopes will be significant expansion.

More effort and resources should be devoted to NRI program evaluation. The board appreciates that slow growth in the NRI's funding level has resulted in stringent efforts to hold administrative costs down; however, the need for accountability argues for freeing the resources of USDA science and education agencies to address evaluation. The NRI should initiate a vigorous effort to define key performance measures, including participation of a broadened science community. These measures should document impact on undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and address the effectiveness of the variety of NRI grant types. Systematic documentation of scientific and broader societal benefits devised from grants supported by the NRI should be pursued. The USDA Economic Research Service should be enlisted to collaborate with NRI scientists in an effort to translate benefits into socioeconomic terms.

The NRI should pursue opportunities to promote multidisciplinary research and to expand the participation of all disciplines across program areas. Although multidisciplinary research projects are notoriously difficult to design and execute, the NRI program is addressing these difficulties and establishing a distinct multidisciplinary proposal review process. Further consideration should be given to offering planning grants to prospective research teams, to extending the funding period for multidisciplinary grants to 4 years (it is currently 3 years), and to finding innovative ways to identify individual contributions to such group efforts. At the same time, the NRI should continue its at-

tempts to move away from equating a program area with a specific discipline. Problems in animal systems, for example, may be jointly or separately addressed by animal scientists and human nutritionists. Refinements of the requests for grant proposals and in the selection of peer reviewers will expedite Integration of disciplines into work in every program area.

In 1992, USDA convened a panel to develop a sustainable agriculture ''relevancy protocol'' (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1993), pursuant to farm bill guidance that, where appropriate, the NRI would support the goal of sustainability. Such a protocol would be applied to each NRI project to provide a quantitative index of its relevance to sustainable agriculture. This protocol has yet to be finalized, in large part because of controversy surrounding the definition of "sustainable agriculture" and its connections to particular research efforts. In its current version, the protocol equates relevance with a direct, near-term and positive impact on sustainable on-farm production systems. Such a restrictive view likely means a number of NRI projects would not be considered to be contributing to sustainability because it does not recognize the indirect. yet powerful contribution of much basic and applied research over the long term. Moreover, if there were exclusive focus on sustainability and emphasis of its farm bill definition on the nature of on-farm operations, research supporting better understanding of human nutrition and health, for example, would be implicitly devalued.