Thanks_Tom RR

Agreed, Huskerzoo. As a new assistant professor, you got to like hearing they put a cap on the number of R01 grants and grant dollars per PI. This breaks some of that "fat cat" mentality and spreads the funding around, hopefully benefiting new and med-level faculty researchers.

That would be the hope. they already had stuff to promote junior faculty. Unfortunately granting works a little bit like ponzy schemes. You need to have gotten grants as a grad student to get them as a post doc to get r21s to get r01s. There's still a weird system.

Grant funding begets grant funding as a student or as a faculty member, but during the transition, it is more about your productivity (number of high tier publications) and how cutting edge and innovative your research is. Not to mention the prestige of your institute. If you notice, not much of that speaks to the merit of your research, so you are right to the extent that it is a weird system.