The Good Science Project

We are cross-posting a piece that former NIH official Kris Willis wrote for Macroscience. Kris is now the President and Founder of the Woodley Park Institute, for which I’m a board member. Federal science agencies have long wrestled with the question of how to ensure their billions of dollars of grants and contracts result in maximum benefits for Americans.

The House Appropriations Committee recently adopted a bill and report that affects NIH and other agencies under the umbrella of “Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies.” The bill itself doesn’t say a lot that would be relevant to metascience, with two possible exceptions.

Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence.

When the FDA rejects a new drug application, it sends a so-called “complete response letter” or CRL to the company that applied for the drug approval.

Announcement: I have spent the past few years writing a book on NIH, and it is under contract with MIT Press. The manuscript is in the editing process right now, and there is a ~7,000-word section on mental health that we’re going to cut for the sake of word count. I’m reprinting it here, as it shows why NIH can be overly influenced by groupthink.

I originally wrote this piece a year ago, and then parts of it turned into this co-authored piece at Issues in Science and Technology. But there were several thousand words that didn’t end up being published. I thought it was worth resurrecting here. The National Institutes of Health budget was $49 billion in fiscal year 2023, while the National Science Foundation’s budget was nearly $10 billion. The overall goal is to improve scientific advancement.

Last month, the Academic Freedom Alliance issued guidance highlighting the threat that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) pose to the freedom to conduct research at colleges and universities. If you’re outside academia, you may not have even heard of IRBs (sometimes called Human Subjects committees). But they wield consequential power over what research is pursued in our truth-seeking institutions, and as a result the knowledge the wider public gets to have and benefit from.

Garett is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Chief Economist at Bluechip, a stablecoin rating agency. He is author of the Singapore Trilogy published by Stanford University Press. Eliah is a Professor of Medicine and Design at UC San Diego’s Division of Infectious Diseases & Global Public Health, and the Design Lab. He directs the Center for Health Design, the CDC funded Resilient Shield, and chairs the Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age.

This is a guest post by Jordan Dworkin, an Associate Program Officer in the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, where he works on innovation policy. This post was first published on the Abundance and Growth Blog. A note from Stuart: This newsletter has many readers who are members of Congress or congressional staffers.

This is a guest post by Sarrin Chethik, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Market Shaping Accelerator. The post was first published by the Center for Global Development and the Market Shaping Accelerator on April 16, 2026. *** The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, released earlier this month, would cut the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding by ~$5 billion.