On February 2, the Joe Biden administration announced the revival of a major cancer research initiative. With cumulative funding of $1.8 billion, the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot” aims to boost discovery in cancer research with the goal to “reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years.”

An increase in public funding for science is commendable. But if history is any guide, federal budget increases like the Cancer Moonshot will increase the already rampant inequality in academia by allocating resources primarily to a few top laboratories. This is because public funding for science is almost exclusively given out in competitions — competitions that are regularly won by the same handful of people. The scientists who win these competitions use this funding to scale up their research laboratories to enormous proportions, suppressing the formation and growth of smaller laboratories and binding junior researchers as long-term subordinates.

There are major procedural problems with the competitions for academic grants that facilitate an unjustified bundling of resources in the hands of the few. But the root problem is the idea that competition should serve as the main basis for resource allocation in science in general.