In my [last post](/blog/funding-crisis-not-another-one) on the ongoing self-made funding crisis at UKRI and its subsidiary science-funding agencies, I made a final reference to the administrative overheads in modern science, which would obviously have been too much burden for an already overlong piece to bear. So here is a follow-up on that issue, one not specific to the transient effects of the latest disruption, but generally how we have made science cumbersome and inefficient in the name of accountability. If you run into any UK research (and teaching) academic and ask them how things are going, chances are -- in danger of breaching the British politeness convention of an upbeat non-answer -- there's a good chance the answer will contain some variant on "good, except for all the paperwork". I don't know what most of the public imagine that professors do day-to-day, but a never-ending round of bureaucracy is probably not foremost in mind. Funders and our own institutions demand applications, reports, surveys, etc. _plus_ the reviewing that constitutes the other side of that. Not to mention the departmental and teaching administration, and the more engaged management of our research teams, if we're lucky enough to have them. It's a glorious day when I carve out enough "science time" to *personally* make some progress on a research issue. This is why sabbatical time has become so prized -- not a "year off" or a chance to write a book or similar, but to recapture some of the life-affirming personal creativity and exploration of our PhD and postdoc years that drew us into the system in the first place. How did we get here? The usual justification is "accountability". This was Ian Chapman's primary defence for his upturning of UKRI's funding structures: the public needs to know what their money is being spent on. And as a principle that is fine, even good. But it has limits: how much detail does the public really need or want to know? Take the 175 glossy pages of the [UKRI 2024-25 report](https://www.ukri.org/publications/annual-report-and-accounts-2024-to-2025/)... how much of this has *ever* been read? The main use I have every found is how some tables in the back showcase the lie about increasing international subscriptions. Every funded project also submits tens of pages of reporting every year, even though the research outputs can be discovered through existing publication/output metrics. The REF exercise forces us to spend years once again presenting these outputs in the best possible light, and academic panels reviewing thousands of the already peer-reviewed publications. Grant applications again spread over tens of pages, these days with restrictions on institutional applications that mean in particular junior staff spend significant time on proposals of which the majority never leave their own institution; note that this requires other academics to perform both the internal and then later the external review processes. At least the STFC Consolidated Grant system only requires whole-group applications every 4 years, unlike the bulk of research-council grants which are individual to each project and typically for half that time. I am not aware of the detailed information from these ever being used; the reporting from a previous grant is not fed to the reviewers of the next one to identify when funds have been inefficiently used. And then we have the regular crises like the current one: sitting in a 3-hour online response meeting with 400 other UK academics and researchers I couldn't help but tot up the numbers and note that that single meeting had used up research resources approaching a working year! When you note that the attendance was (by dint of greater responsibility/enthusiasm for such strategic issues) skewed toward the more senior and hence better paid, it's even worse. Think of how hard we fight for research assistant posts, and there go 1-2 years of FTE via a meeting that only existed because of UKRI mismanagement. (Yes, yes, we inflict plenty of science meetings that don't need to exist, too. Smart researchers tend to figure out which ones are worth their while.) Talking to some of the most senior particle-physics academics in the country, responding to the UKRI crisis has been their virtually sole activity so far this year, so you can multiply up a few more FTEs that way, too. Bear in mind that this is all in the name of good governance! I am reminded of [Parkinson's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law) -- one of few "laws" not to fall foul of [Stigler's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy) -- and in particular "The number of workers within public administration tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done." I once attended an "academic entrepreneurship" course with a speaker who was a lot more frank than the organisers intended, who dismissed the role of university technology-transfer offices as "if you fill an office with patent attorneys, what do you think they'll do? They'll file patents, it's all they know how to do. Of which nearly all are useless and are never taken to completion". We have grown a culture of the same form in research administration, certainly at UKRI and other levels both national and international, but also within universities, into teaching administration and oversight, and beyond. Academics, who are not generally hired for their interest in or aptitude at bureaucracy, are being flattened by the onslaught, from an army of self-perpetuating administrators who do not intrinsically value the researchers' time. Getting out of this hole requires leadership. Partly the growth in oversight burden is because the people employed by agencies value that work and see everywhere opportunities to increase it. Good leadership requires the CEOs to push back and demand the lightest overhead needed to assure *proportionate* accountability. We repeatedly see in application review that the majority of shortlisted applications are "fundable but not funded", i.e. good proposals but not enough money left: this is not a position that requires heavy-handed oversight, it's a buyer's market for quality research. The agency CEOs and eventually their political masters need a level of confidence in their departments' work that their inputs and outputs substantiate, but which they seem to be lacking: a confident executive does not need to hide behind reams of ass-covering compliance screed. Layering bureaucracy in the name of efficiency is a bad joke, which needs to be called out. I would *love* to see grant reporting have to honestly estimate the fractions of staff time occupied not with the research they pledged to do, but with managing the well-intentioned oversight demands on that research. This is *never* built into costing, but *is* nominally collected in university time-allocation reporting (if you think that can be trusted). What would the public think of the responsibility of the funders and universities, for squandering expensive expert-researcher time on so much busywork?