Metascience‑led Funding Experiments

Turn metascience into an operational arm of federal funders that runs randomized or quasi‑experimental trials of science‑policy reforms (for example, people‑over‑projects grants, targeted replication funds, or alternative peer‑review methods) and uses outcome metrics to scale what works. The NSF’s Office of Metascience (Sept 2026) and Matt Faherty’s study propose exactly this experimental agenda as a way to improve research efficiency and reproducibility. — If federal agencies systematically experiment with how they fund science, academic incentives, the distribution of research money, and the reproducibility of published results could shift within a single policy cycle.