Distribution of Researcher-Level Funding Allocation among U.S. federal funding agencies

This research-in-progress paper outlines the data collection approach and preliminary results of a study looking at the distribution of research funding from U.S. federal agencies. The goal of this project is to see whether the Matthew Effect, or cumulative advantage, can be found in the distribution of federal funding at the researcher level. The hypothesis of this study is that fewer PIs are being awarded larger proportions of the overall funding pool. This project studies the distribution of the number of grants and amount of funding per primary investigator awarded by eight federal funding agencies from 2008 to 2020. The preliminary results show that the concentration of funding varies across agencies.