# NSF Program officers can have multi-decade tenures There are pros and cons to long program officer tenures. On the positive side, NSF program officers get an opportunity to know the scientists in an area. [[Professors have long term relationships with their NSF program officers]]. These relationships hopefully enable the good pieces of informal backchannels, like good ideas bubbling up from researchers, less friction and less need to escalate things. However, [[Informal backchannels are a two sided sword]]. A long tenure hopefully gives program officers the perspective to think about funding fields on long time horizons. On the negative side, long tenures can open program officers to the incentives of [[Asymmetric career risk]]. Studies have shown that even NSF programs that are supposed to be ‘high risk’ have a pretty good success rate. (See: [[Evaluating transformative research programmes: A case study of the NSF Small Grants for Exploratory Research programme]].) The committee-based process of creating research agendas and deciding on grants reinforces this because as long as the program officer is going along with a group experts, they can’t be held personally accountable for the results of their program. [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]. Long program manager tenures could potentially slow down scientific progress. After you’ve been thinking about a field in a certain way for more than a decade, why would you change? In this way program officers could be a blocker to paradigm shifts in the [[Thomas Kuhn]]sian sense ([[kuhnStructureScientificRevolutions1962]]). NSF Program officer tenure stands in contrast to how [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]]. ### Related * [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]] * [[NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis]]