Abundance

by Ezra Klein

boardinghouse at Fourteenth and Harvard Streets. Boardinghouses were a common place for adults to live through much of American history. They worked something like today’s college dorms: The rooms were small, the bathrooms and kitchenettes shared, and the cost was low. They weren’t as nice to live in as a single-family home with a detached garage, but they were far nicer than a tent in the middle of an encampment in the dark of winter. So where did they go? The answer is that they were made, in most jurisdictions, functionally illegal. By the 1950s, rooming houses were already a target for city planners looking to maintain high home prices and orderly neighborhoods.

Over time, planners did exactly that: Zoning and building codes required homes to be built with ever more features and amenities. Minimum parking requirements were added and maximum residency limits appeared. Some of this was done to upgrade housing stock or protect health and safety. Some of it was done to eliminate entire forms of housing that gave the poor or the unlucky a continued toehold in richer neighborhoods. Does it really “protect the roomers” to move them from a boarding home without parking spaces to a tent beneath the overpass?

And it is not even surprising that cities often choose to limit the forms of housing, or even the amount of housing, that can be built nearby. After all, if you already own a home, scarcity makes the asset you own all the more valuable.

Our favorite of these charts shows how many years an average wage earner would presumably need to save to buy a home. In 1950, it’s 2.3 years. In 1960, it’s 2.6 years. In 1970, it’s 2.4 years. But then something happens. By 1980, it’s 3.8 years. By 1990, it’s 5.4 years. By 2000, it’s 7 years.53 And this forward march is hiding the regional differences: that home you could buy with 2.4 years of labor in 1970 was in a different kind of city than that home you could buy after even 7 years of work at median wages in 2000.

asset. You bought a home to live in it. But that changed in the 1970s. Inflation was part of the reason. One of the main aims of federal housing policy has been to make possible the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, a peculiar financial device that wouldn’t survive a day in the economic wild. What lender in their right mind would hand out thirty-year loans on fixed terms to virtually anybody with a job? But the federal government backed those mortgages and made the interest payments on them into large tax deductions, and so they became the cornerstone of the American housing market.

From 1955 to 1970, owner-occupied housing held at about 21 percent of total household net wealth.54 Between 1970 and 1979, it climbed to 30 percent of net wealth. For those who owned a home, it was much more of their total wealth than that. But a home is a peculiar form of wealth. You typically need to live in it. Selling stocks or bonds liquidates an asset you don’t use in your day-to-day life. Selling a home liquidates the place you sleep, the walls within which you may have raised your children or grown to adulthood yourself. Financial interest merges with sentimental attachment and daily need.

It is worth a moment to consider how financially problematic an owner-occupied home was at the beginning of the twentieth century—and remains to the present. An investment advisor whom you have consulted looks at your middle-income portfolio and tells you that you should put almost all of your liquid assets in a single investment. It is not a diversified mutual fund; it is a single firm, and the firm makes only one product in a single location. It has a great upside in that its returns are almost entirely untaxed under federal and state income tax laws, and it insures you against rent increases by the landlord. But its asset value is subject to a multitude of risks. Not least are those from the neighborhood and the single municipality in which the firm is located. Bad events next door, down the street, at the school district, and in city hall can put your life savings in a tailspin.

“At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight,” she writes. “Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.”

Then came civil rights legislation that made it illegal to directly discriminate against homebuyers based on race. Communities that wanted to—in the sanitized language of real estate—“preserve their character” needed to find other means by which to do it. And they did, through rules like setting a large minimum lot size for new construction.

In 1943, Los Angeles residents woke up to air so dark and noxious that they feared the Japanese had launched a gas attack.63 Five years later, a lethal smog in Donora, Pennsylvania, caused by industrial pollutants from zinc-smelting plants and a temperature inversion that trapped toxins in the air64 killed twenty people and sickened thousands.65 In New Hampshire, the Merrimack River, lined with textile mills in Manchester and Nashua, ran in different colors by the day, as dyes and chemicals dumped into the river tinged the water red, then green, then yellow.66 In Cleveland, Ohio, on June 22, 1969, oily waste and debris were ignited, possibly by a flare thrown onto the Cuyahoga River, sparking a fire as tall as a four-story building.67 In Pittsburgh, midcentury drivers had to use their windshield wipers to clear away the soot so they could see the road.68 America in the 1950s and ’60s was paradoxically the richest superpower in world history and functioned as a kind of mass-industrial conspiracy to kill its own residents.

Then, in 1972, came a case called Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors of Mono County. A developer had proposed to build six buildings’ worth of condominiums and shops and restaurants near Mammoth Lakes, one of California’s beloved ski resort areas. Friends of Mammoth, a homeowners’ association, sued to stop the build, arguing that it would strain water and sewage resources. The novelty of their argument was that they sued under CEQA. The legislation, as passed, held that government entities in California needed to produce environmental impact reports before embarking on major new projects. But the developer of the proposed Mammoth Lakes condos was not an arm of the California state, and this was not a public project. The argument of the Mammoth homeowners held that yes, actually, it was, because any development that required public permits to be built was inherently a public project.

A couple of years later, government agencies in California were reviewing more than four thousand environmental impact statements annually—four times more than the entire federal government was generating under the facially similar National Environmental Policy Act. CEQA became a potent weapon against the construction of new homes. “Between 1972 and 1975, twenty-nine thousand proposed homes in the Bay Area—roughly a fifth of the region’s total housing production at the time—were subject to environmental litigation,” Anbinder writes.

But to conserve our climate requires more than mere inaction. To do nothing—to let greenhouse gas emissions accelerate as they would if we kept burning coal and oil and gas heedlessly—is to welcome warming of four or five or six degrees Celsius. These are numbers that diverge from the climate of the eighteenth century as sharply as the climate of the eighteenth century diverges from the Ice Age.1 These are numbers inside which the planetary systems that sustain us break.

“Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy,” writes Hannah Ritchie in Not the End of the World. “It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong.”15 As societies become economically and technologically rich, they clean their air and water. Air pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way.

Not true in US

What is true across space is also true across time. In 1979, Americans pumped out 22.7 tons of CO2 per person; Canadians, 18.2; Germans, 14.3; Australians, 13.2; the UK, 11.5, France, 10.22 All these countries are richer today than they were then, and yet they emit less carbon, per person, than they did then.

Correlation, doubtful wealth fixed without guidance

What is changing, in all these countries, is the source of power. “In 1900, nearly all of the UK’s energy came from coal, and by 1950 it was still supplying over 90%,” writes Ritchie. “Now coal supplies less than 2% of our electricity, and the government has pledged to phase it out completely by 2025.”24 Indeed, the last coal-fired power station operating in the UK shuttered in September 2024.25

Coal was mlstly replaced by gas

Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people while using far less land. Desalination is a major contributor to water supplies in Israel now and could supply more than half of the demand in Singapore by the middle of the century. The technology could become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible, giving us a path to reversing climate change over time.

Jenkins’s team has modeled that build-out in detail. A plausible path to decarbonization sees wind and solar installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers. That is roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

“To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400 MW solar power facilities—each taking up at least 2,000 acres—every week for the next 30 years.”38

6.2 million acres

But progress crawled and costs ballooned. In his final State of the State address, in 2018, Brown tried to rally Californians to the task. “Difficulties challenge us but they can’t discourage or stop us,” he said.43 The next year, Gavin Newsom, who had served as lieutenant governor, succeeded Brown. “Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were.”

Fuck Newsom

These days, six years is roughly the amount of time it takes California to realize that its bullet train needs to be pushed back by another decade. In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.48

In reality, it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession, and two and a half years of legal wrangling, to get the land. That story repeated and repeated again and again. There are parts of the build that intersect with the freight rail lines. But the freight rail lines are so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas no construction can happen for a large chunk of the year. Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner. The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024 it still wasn’t finished. “I’m always amazed the staff has been working on these segments for a decade or longer to get through the environmental process,” Brian Kelly, who served as CEO of the High-Speed Rail Authority from 2018 to 2024, says.50 What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners.

There is one school of thought that says it is worth taking the time to do these projects right. If the reviews and the negotiations and the consultations take a few more years, those are years well spent. But they carry a price tag. “Time is a killer on the estimate of a project’s cost,” Kelly said.

One response—the typical Republican response—is that government is intrinsically inefficient. But the data doesn’t bear that out. The Transit Costs Project tracks the price tags on rail projects in different countries. It’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison here, because different projects are, well, different, and it matters whether they include, say, a tunnel, which is expensive for all the obvious reasons. Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $609 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $384 million. Canada gets it done for $295 million. Japan clocks in at $267 million. Portugal is the cheapest country in the database, at $96 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do,54 perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build. We looked into it, and it turns out that all those countries also have governments. So the problem cannot simply be government. Nor is the problem unions—another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States.

These dynamics help explain the curious finding that ends Syverson and Goolsbee’s paper. After looking at the states with the highest construction productivity, they note that the more productive states don’t seem to gain market share in the construction industry. That doesn’t make much sense if you assume that the difficulties of construction are primarily the organization of manpower and materials. It makes more sense if you assume that the frictions are in navigating local regulations, community considerations, neighbors’ qualms, and politicians’ interests. Developers are often fixtures in the local political scene. They have to be. “My feeling is the guys that know the system have a much easier time getting through the system,” Zarenski said. “They know ahead of time what they have to come into the party with and how to speak to those people and how to satisfy them, and so it goes a lot smoother for them.”63 But a thorough knowledge of one city or state, and establishing relationships with its decision-makers, won’t necessarily translate to success in another.

In a separate paper, Ed Glaeser and four coauthors add to this story.64 They begin with an astonishing fact: from 1935 to 1970, the number of homes produced per construction worker increased at the same pace as, and sometimes even faster than, the number of cars produced per automobile industry worker or the total manufactured output per industrial worker.

When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.

The Pew Research Center has aggregated decades of polls tracking the public’s trust in government. The high mark on the chart is in 1964, when 77 percent of the public believed that the government would do the right thing all or most of the time. Confidence plummets from there. In the ’70s, after Watergate, it sits in the 30s. It rebounds into the 40s in the ’80s and briefly brushes the 60s after 9/11, but the downward trend is undeniable. By 2023 it sat at 16 percent.90 This is not, in our view, attributable solely or even mainly to cumbersome government processes. But the collapse in trust across the same decades that so many processes were being built to affirm that government could be trusted should make us question whether we have yoked the state to a failed theory of legitimacy.

But that bargain has broken down. The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process. And this is not just the view of a few law professors. “The environmentalist movement evolved to stop bad people from destroying the world, and so we have perfected the art of saying no,” says Larry Selzer, the president and CEO of the Conservation Fund. “But we can’t ‘no’ our way to the kind of growth we need. The Interstate Highway System is forty-nine thousand miles of road. The interstate clean-energy system—the solar farms, the wind turbines, the geothermal land, the transmission lines, the pipes—will touch more than five hundred thousand miles of land. This will be an enormous project. We have to build, and build, and build.”

To many environmentalists, that’s a victory. It should be harder to build highways. But that same architecture of law affects the infrastructure they care about, too. “It is important to keep in mind what is actually expected to be permitted in the coming decades,” Liscow continues. “Among projects seeking to connect to the grid (which is one indicator—though an imperfect one—of what will ultimately be built), 95% of the capacity is solar, battery storage, or wind.” That’s a dramatic change from 1969, “when 81% of the electricity supply was petrochemical and only 19% was zero-emission.”

New problems and new solutions require new laws. Ruhl and Salzman favor past models by which certain kinds of projects have been fast-tracked past environmental and legal challenges. A 1996 law offered this favoritism to border security, and the Trump administration used it to great effect in constructing parts of their border wall. In another example, Congress recognized that we had too many military bases after the Cold War and that closing them through the normal congressional process would be politically impossible. So they created an independent base-closing commission that received recommendations from the Department of Defense, proposed plans for closure based on those recommendations, and ensured those plans got simple and fast up-and-down votes. In October 2024, President Biden signed legislation exempting semiconductor-manufacturing facilities receiving subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act from environmental review.101 Something similar could be created for green infrastructure, Ruhl and Salzman suggest, with projects deemed important to our climate goals fast-tracked past a slew of normal hurdles. Something akin to this system would, in their thinking, update our environmental laws for a new age, tuning them to meet the challenge of today rather than the challenge of yesteryear.

Tahanan was built on the former site of a parking lot and temporary bail bond office. Sounds easy enough to build on. But it wasn’t zoned for affordable housing. The project could get off the ground only because of legislation passed by State Senator Scott Wiener in 2017 that fast-tracked certain kinds of affordable housing projects in California past the local approval process.3 “This project didn’t have to go before the planning department for discretionary review or the Board of Supervisors,” Rebecca Foster, the chief executive of the Housing Accelerator Fund, which led the development of Tahanan, said. “We got our entitlements in four months, which is unheard-of.” But that merely means you can begin the process of building. When you’re building affordable housing, you’re typically using public money. When you’re using public money, you have to abide by public requirements. Take the Local Business Enterprise and Non-Discrimination in Contracting Ordinance, also known as 14B.4 These requirements began in 1984 as a preference for minority- and female-owned contractors. But in 1996, California passed Proposition 209, which held that “the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”5 Instead of scrapping the contracting requirements, San Francisco rewrote them to favor small busi...

What made Tahanan possible was a $65 million grant from Charles and Helen Schwab.8 The grant’s conditions were that the housing had to be built in under three years and for under $400,000 a unit. By using private financing, the project avoided the standards and rules that public money carries. That isn’t to say the political system in San Francisco was against the project. The Board of Supervisors approved a crucial lease to keep the development operating into the future. But private money was the secret sauce. It is damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds. Shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?

Across Europe, government-administered health-care systems negotiate down the prices of drugs and treatments. In America, our fear of socialized medicine has led to a hodgepodge of private and public insurers who do not coordinate and do not effectively negotiate. The weight-loss drug Ozempic, for instance, costs about ten times as much in America as it does in Britain or France.9 Those countries have national health-care systems that restrict what pharmaceutical companies can charge, and we do not. As a result, taxpayers in Europe spend less on health care, as a percentage of GDP, than taxpayers in America. And then Americans have enormous private bills atop our public spending. Keeping the American health-care state weak has made the American government larger and left Americans poorer.

In 2023, the San Francisco metro area issued about 7,500 new housing permits. The Boston metro area issued 10,500. New York City, Newark, and Jersey City—together—issued slightly fewer than 40,000. The Houston metro area issued almost 70,000.11 This divergence is decades old, and its consequences are clear. Houston has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city.

Houston MSA also has double the area and a third of the density

A report by the Semiconductor Industry Association says that the US share of global semiconductor-manufacturing capacity dropped from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2020.28 Part of the reason is cost. The association estimates that building and operating a semiconductor-manufacturing facility in the United States costs about 30 percent more over ten years than it does in Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore.29 In 2023, the Biden administration released its Notice of Funding Opportunity for the $39 billion it intended to hand out to semiconductor manufacturers to locate new fabs in the United States. Reading the NOFO was a strange experience. Here was the US government trying to recapture an industry it had lost in part because it had become cost-prohibitive to manufacture semiconductors domestically. But the NOFO did not seem laser-focused on the cost problem. To be honest, it did not seem laser-focused on any problem.

When California applied for federal money under the terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration gave preference to bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered was not really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific places. The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there, and so did the initial construction. California is building high-speed rail in a place that makes it less likely that it will generate the ridership, political support, and financial backing to ever finish. The irony is that it’s not just bad for the high-speed rail project. It’s also bad for air pollution across the state.

In the Bay Area, a different story played out. In 2012, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) signed a contract with Alstom, a French rail car manufacturer, to deliver 775 cars for $2.58 billion.36 By 2023, though, something unusual had happened: the cars were coming in faster, and cheaper, than expected. The cost estimate was slashed by almost $400 million.37 One major source of savings, reported trains.com, was “BART’s decision to have its own staff do more of the engineering work in house. The project team has included engineers who have successfully completed new rail car projects at other agencies.”38 Nor is this an isolated anecdote. Zachary Liscow’s research found that increasing employment in state departments of transportation by 1 employee per 1,000 residents reduced the cost-per-mile of highway construction by 26 percent.39 Government cannot do everything itself. But it needs enough know-how to oversee the projects it is doing.

Pahlka has come to think of government technology—and the regulations that control it—as layers of sediment. As new problems emerge, new layers are added. But the older ones are rarely removed. “Each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies,” she writes. “The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on to.”42 The challenge of updating government technology is the challenge of updating, harmonizing, or terminating the functions of these old systems. And all of it must be done while following procurement and contracting rules that no private technology company would ever impose on itself.

On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck carrying 8,500 gallons of gasoline flipped over. The truck ignited underneath the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia, killing the driver and melting the steel beams undergirding it. The I-95 bridge, which carries 160,000 cars daily, collapsed. This wasn’t just a crisis for a roadway. It was a crisis for a region. I-95 is one of the main transportation arteries on the East Coast. It’s a crucial connector between New York and Washington. Officials, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, warned that rebuilding it would take months. And it would have taken months, or longer, under Pennsylvania’s normal rules. “We would hire a consultant to design it,” Mike Carroll, the Pennsylvania secretary of transportation, says. “We’d need final design approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Then there’d be bidding from interested contractors. Then we’d process the bids. Then we’d issue a contract. That’d take about twelve to twenty-four months.”52 But Shapiro signed a declaration of emergency that exempted the rebuilding process from the rules and requirements that slow so many public projects down.

“The emergency declaration gave us the ability to engage contractors without bidding,” Carroll said. “Work commenced the moment the fire department released the scene—that same day.”

All the labor Pennsylvania used was union labor. And they pushed hard: work went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.54 A twenty-four-hour live cam trained on the site allowed the public to follow along.

It’s worth taking seriously what Carroll says there. These were risks. There are reasons these rules are in place. No-bid contracts can enable corruption as well as speed. There are reasons not to put down asphalt when it’s raining. But in turning these questions from choices into rules, we have taken discretion and judgment away from people like Carroll. We prefer that projects go badly by the book. We minimize some risks but make delay and high costs routine.

The emergency declaration allowed Shapiro to make choices. He chose to use union labor but to gore a lot of other interests and processes. I-95 reopened in just twelve days—not the “months” initially forecasted. Shapiro did “one heck of a job,” President Biden said.56 His popularity swelled, and he began to be mentioned as a possible future presidential candidate. Turns out people like it when their government gets things done.

If keeping up the pace of scientific progress demands more resources, it points to a clear solution: recruit more scientists and spend more money. These aren’t bad ideas; they might be great ones. “As a share of the economy, government-funded R&D has declined in the last sixty years,” the economist Heidi Williams said.47 If scientific spending is fundamental to economic growth, this suggests that the US has hugely underinvested in basic research.

Let’s define the Karikó Problem like this: American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky ideas. What is most obvious is that American science is getting older. In the early 1900s, some of the most famous scientists—Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger—did their breakthrough work in their twenties and thirties. Indeed, their youth may have been critical to their paradigm-busting genius. But these days the twentysomething scientist is an endangered species. The share of NIH-funded scientists who are thirty-five years old or younger declined from 22 percent in 1980 to less than 2 percent by the 2010s.54

“When you look at the diminishing returns in medicine, you can say, well, maybe all the easy drugs have been discovered,” said James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. But the more compelling possibility, he said, is that “the very organization of modern science is leading us astray.” In Evans’s interpretation, the low-hanging fruit hasn’t been plucked. The problem is that too many scientists are all looking at the same few trees. “I think there are all kinds of weird trees in the forest that we haven’t found, because everybody’s looking in the same place, and we’re not making enough high-risk, high-reward bets,” Evans said. “That has nothing to do with the knowledge burden. That’s all about the organization of American science. It’s about our policies, our laws, and our rules.”

In 2012, Gregory Petsko, a biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a satirical essay in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain mock Christopher Columbus for not collecting preliminary data about the voyage across the Atlantic. When King Ferdinand suggests that the explorer try a shorter trip—say, to Portugal—Columbus exclaims, “Everybody knows that Portugal is immediately west of Spain.… What will you learn from that?” “Not much, if anything,” Queen Isabella responds. “But it can’t fail, now, can it? Besides, you’ve sailed to Portugal before, so the Study Section would know you can do it.”58 This satire didn’t appear in a personal blog. It ran in Genome Biology, one of the most prestigious journals in the field of genetics.

If we are living in the world that Bush built, we are also living in the world that Shannon feared. As science funding became more entrenched inside the federal government, politicians did what they do best. They created paperwork. In the early 1960s, Congressman Lawrence Fountain, a Democrat from North Carolina, published two reports complaining that the NIH did a lousy job accounting for the money it sent to scientists. He convinced Congress to take the unusual step of cutting the agency’s funding.68 A decade later, Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat, created the Golden Fleece Award to draw negative attention to the worst use of government money in science. The first two Golden Fleece Awards went to studies about human attraction and why mammals clench their jaws when stressed. Proxmire called on government science funding to “get out of the love racket” and declared that these projects “made a monkey out of the American taxpayer.”69 The NIH got the message. Requirements for paperwork surged.

To appreciate the explosion of scientific paperwork requirements, imagine if every scientist working in America contracted a chronic fatigue disorder that made it impossible for them to work for half of the year. We would consider this to be a national tragedy and an emergency. But this make-believe disorder is not so dissimilar to the burden we place on scientists today when it comes to paperwork. Today’s scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on filling out research grants and follow-up administrative documents, rather than on direct research.72 Funding agencies sometimes take seven months or longer to review an application or request a resubmission.