ABSTRACT
The policy decisions about federal support of research originated in a request from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Vannevar Bush, then head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. A multiplicity of funding agencies, rather than the original plan of Roosevelt and Bush for a single National Science Foundation, has had consequences that get far less attention than they deserve. Bush stressed repeatedly the need for an agency to fund basic research. Once several funding agencies were established, they found they had to compete for proposals from good researchers. An agency would look bad if all the Nobel Prizes went to the grantees of other agencies. Bush's original idea, of a single foundation, could have left the individual researchers at the mercy of the administrators of that one agency. For a whole generation, competition among several research funding agencies saved us from favoritism and porkbarrel funding of research, with the stagnation they would inevitably have brought.
