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High need areas should be identified in an RFA, and only applications that directly match the RFA should be passed to the full proposal stage. At present, RFA’s seem to be ignored by researchers and especially councils when making funding decisions.
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These changes would empower the NIH to support the goverment’s government’s priorities, allow exciting ground-breaking research to flourish, speed up research, massively cut administrative waste at the NIH and in universities, and spread great research across the country, engaging great researchers everywhere, not just those who got into the elite R1s.