A tumultuous period for federal research funding would seem like precisely the wrong moment to experiment with new funding models. But that’s wrong.

Federal research funding is a cornerstone of U.S. competitiveness and national security – and one that is facing an unprecedented moment of uncertainty. Navigating this uncertainty will require experimentation with new models that can accelerate scientific progress. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new X-Labs program, which encompasses roughly just two percent of the funding institution’s overall research budget, is exactly that. 

X-Labs build on promising early results from a recent proliferation of philanthropically-supported independent lab models, and in particular, Focused Research Organizations (FROs) that catalyze capital and harness team science to unlock entirely new fields of scientific inquiry. These ambitious and high-leverage research infrastructure investments have already delivered tremendous breakthroughs: the largest map of drug-target interactions ever built, a global atlas of ocean alkalinity enhancement to aid in carbon dioxide removal, and reductions in the cost of proteomics twenty-seven-fold that can accelerate biomedical research. 

As impressive as early FRO results have been, they just scratch the surface of the model’s potential. There are many more possible breakthroughs, significantly beyond the capacity of philanthropic resources to support. Yet team-based, goal-oriented science has always been a difficult fit for the dominant federal funding models organized around research project grants. That’s why what’s truly novel about X-Labs is that NSF has found a way to achieve scale: up to $1.5 billion in funding structured around milestones, giving teams an opportunity to work on problems that lend themselves to a different set of incentives than academia typically requires.

Not everyone is excited. In a recent essay in Science, Pierre Azoulay of MIT makes a careful case for skepticism that government funding is the right model for scaling independent labs. Others have highlighted the potential zero sum funding dynamics facing academic institutions, based on recent Science reporting, though the perception that NSF is diverting resources from academic research funding to X-Labs is inaccurate. Still others have expressed concerns about public accountability, given X-Labs’ substantial operational independence at a moment when the Trump administration seeks to assert greater political control of grantmaking.

The harsh reality is that academic institutions are at a crossroads; the modern research university runs on a fraying cross-subsidy model that has hidden the real price of doing research. With simultaneous pressure on federal grants, indirect cost recovery, tuition and endowment returns, the path forward will require experimentation with alternative models at the institutional level.

NSF has explicitly framed X-Labs as an opportunity for academic institutions, giving them the license to create a platform for their researchers to engage in goal-oriented team science with less internal administrative burden and absent the proposal and publishing treadmills. For some institutions, this opportunity will prove a golden one. And in the spirit of a true experiment, some of what works in this sandbox – intellectual property, team structure, novel metrics – may be worth broader adoption as institutions find their way past the crossroads. 

I see X-Labs as the culmination of two significant developments in how research is conducted.

The first is the bipartisan mandate handed to NSF by Congress when it created the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate through the CHIPS and Science Act. Some architects of this legislation, and the Endless Frontier Act on which it was based, were explicit that formidable and growing competition from China meant that our research institutions would need to evolve, and their intent was to provide NSF the latitude to fund targeted priorities differently. As always, diagnosing unified Congressional intent is difficult, but what Congress codified was the creation of the first new NSF directorate in over 30 years, one with the flexibility to deploy flexible “Other Transactions Authority” for nontraditional grantmaking – not as a substitute, but as a supplement and translational accelerant to NSF’s core research funding mission. 

This bet is already delivering unexpected results. In 2022, few thought NSF was well-suited or capable of successfully driving the regional impact of translational research. But four years later, patience is paying off: $135M of TIP investment in nine regional hubs through the Regional Innovation Engines program has catalyzed more than $2B in matching commitments – an impressive 15x multiplier on taxpayer dollars. 

Like the Engines program, X-Labs is an experiment being undertaken with TIP’s own budget, not with funds siphoned from other directorates that would otherwise be used for research project grants, as recent reporting has suggested. And X-Labs’ initial focus on scientific instrumentation directly feeds discovery science across NSF’s core research domains. For the community that championed CHIPS and Science, these kinds of experiments are exactly what we had hoped to see.

Second, X-Labs follow strong, decades-long precedent for the federal research enterprise to embrace and scale models that philanthropy has de-risked. Examples abound. 

For years, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has provided stable, investigator-centered institutional funding as a means to enable transformative research by insulating extraordinarily promising PIs from the constraints of grant-based funding. Azoulay’s own pioneering research on the HHMI model — which funded ‘people not projects’ — found this model had a significant role in generating novel research. Inspired by the example, the National Institutes of Health has since added pathways to its funding portfolio – such as the Transformative Research Award – to bet on extraordinary people rather than their projects.

In 2003, philanthropist Paul Allen put $100 million into a new brain science institute built on the premise that a tightly coordinated team focused on an ambitious goal – creating an atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain – could deliver success where a series of traditional research grants wouldn’t. This team-based model succeeded, delivering the foundational infrastructure on which significant subsequent federal efforts such as the BRAIN Initiative ultimately relied to scale. 

Recent years have lent the philanthropically-supported independent lab model more significant momentum. Since 2021, the Arc Institute in Palo Alto – a university-affiliated biomedical research organization – has organized researchers into teams in pursuit of breakthrough research outside of a traditional academic structure. And in 2020, I helped champion Adam Marblestone’s and Sam Rodriques’ original FRO concept for independent, team-based and time-bound nonprofits aimed at problems that sit in the gap between what academia rewards and what industry will fund. The original proposal targeted federal research agencies, but I saw firsthand that these institutions weren’t ready for the experiment without some fundamental questions answered through philanthropic de-risking. That day has come: Convergent Research, with hundreds of millions in philanthropic support, has since launched ten FROs in domains as distinct as brain mapping, ocean carbon modeling, and software for mathematics, with significant proof points.

Now, nudged by some sharp policy thinking from Caleb Watney at Institute for Progress on how the government can scale the approach, X-Labs seek to expand on what FROs have shown is possible: the generation of foundational infrastructure for entire new fields of research science. The vision for X-Labs is appropriately as a tool of portfolio diversification – as announced, just two percent of NSF budget – rather than a means to replace or indirectly reform the dominant funding model of research program grants. And as with any true experiment that pushes scientific boundaries, there will be learning and evolution along the way. X-Labs funding will be time-bound, and as institutions they should wind down when they’ve reached their goals. Some will surely fail altogether, and some will unlock whole new fields of scientific inquiry, and with that economic competitiveness and growth.

On this path forward, NSF will also need to strike a difficult balance between autonomy and accountability. Its decision to fund X-Labs through TIP’s Other Transaction Authority – a flexible contracting mechanism simply defined by what it’s not – should not mean an absence of accountability. But accountability mechanisms must be fit for purpose – lightweight, public-facing, and outcome-oriented (i.e., does the public know what was funded and what it produced?) -– rather than process-heavy and approval-based. The initial X-Labs solicitation offers encouraging indications of results-oriented accountability (milestone payments) and IP management plans, but the details are very much in execution to come. 

I’m bullish. At a tumultuous moment for research, we need more experiments like X-Labs, not fewer.

In a previous post, we announced an initiative to connect scientists, engineers, technologists, and skilled federal workers and contractors who have recently departed government service with the emerging innovation ecosystems across America that could use their expertise. With the support of FAS, we are now excited to share the launch of the Innovation Ecosystem Job Board. This unique job board contains opportunities from across the nation with the explicit goal of matching in-demand science and technology talent with open positions across the nation’s innovation ecosystems, in roles ranging from lab researchers and data scientists to workforce development practitioners and science communicators.

These innovation ecosystems – namely Tech Hubs and NSF Engines – are advancing critical technologies spanning from advanced manufacturing to quantum computing to biotech, all vital for our national and economic security. To accomplish this work, they operate as multi-stakeholder coalitions that bring together universities, industry, nonprofits, and other partners, all searching for talent to help them fulfill their missions. 

These coalitions face growing talent needs, particularly for mission-driven roles that can help drive progress across critical technology areas. Meanwhile, we’re witnessing an exodus of thousands of experienced federal talent from agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health, and the Department of Energy whose knowledge gained from years of managing and working in multimillion-dollar technical programs could be lost entirely if not effectively redeployed.

This initiative directly addresses both challenges by collaborating with innovation ecosystems to identify their immediate talent needs while simultaneously engaging displaced federal workers through job fairs and targeted outreach to understand their backgrounds and geographic preferences. It’s a purposeful approach that ensures mission-driven federal talent can continue contributing to America’s technological leadership. By connecting talent to need, we help strategically imperative innovation ecosystems access the experienced professionals necessary for success. 

We will be updating this job board regularly with opportunities from additional Tech Hubs, NSF Engines, and other innovation ecosystems. While our outreach is specifically to former federal workers and contractors, this job board is open to all, and we encourage others on the job hunt to take a look.

As economic policy wonks, we understand that there are often frictions that hinder matching between individuals with the right skills and geographic preferences and the jobs that exist. We are taking this seriously and will engage in what we’re calling “light-touch matching”. Please feel free to fill out this interest form (whether you have applied to a listing on the job board or not), and we will flag profiles that generally align with relevant innovation ecosystems and their needs. 

Our process:

We spent the last several months talking to and learning from other talent connectors, innovation ecosystem builders, and the talent themselves. Through facilitated federal roundtables with former federal workers, we understood more deeply their diverse skill sets, their unwavering commitment to mission-driven work, and the unique challenges they face in their current job transition. Work for America’s research on federal workers also validated our hypotheses: these are experienced professionals (59% of survey respondents have a decade or more of experience), are geographically distributed (53% already live outside the DC-Virginia-Maryland area), and are mobile (54% are open to relocating). Job fairs additionally provided us an opportunity to meet individuals leaving the federal government and hear about their backgrounds and interests.

Simultaneously, we reached out to several innovation ecosystems to explore if they had immediate talent needs. Some ecosystems shared their most critical postings among their partners; others had recently conducted surveys of their coalitions to assess available positions and passed that information on to us; still others are actively developing comprehensive approaches to capture all the talent needs across their expansive coalitions. We reviewed and aggregated these opportunities into the job board which is now available and will be regularly updated. We are grateful for all these ecosystems that have engaged in this initiative and we look forward to continuing the conversation with more ecosystems and skilled former federal professionals alike.

Like anything new, this is an experiment. Does this effort in the end successfully match candidates and employers based on skills and geography? If you use this tool, please let us know how it goes!

Maryam Janani-Flores (mjananiflores@fas.org) is a Senior Fellow at FAS and former Chief of Staff at the U.S. Economic Development Administration. Meron Yohannes (myohannes@fas.org) is a Digital Services Alumni Fellow at FAS and most recently served as Senior Policy Advisor for the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.