  Over the last decade proposal success rates in the fundamental sciences have
dropped significantly. Astronomy and related fields funded by NASA and NSF are
no exception. Data across agencies show that this is not principally the result
of a decline in proposal merit (the proportion of proposals receiving high
rankings is largely unchanged), nor of a shift in proposer demographics
(seniority, gender, and institutional affiliation have all remained unchanged),
nor of an increase (beyond inflation) in the average requested funding per
proposal, nor of an increase in the number of proposals per investigator in any
one year. Rather, the statistics are consistent with a scenario in which agency
budgets for competed research are flat or decreasing in inflation-adjusted
dollars, the overall population of investigators has grown, and a larger
proportion of these investigators are resubmitting meritorious but unfunded
proposals. This White Paper presents statistics which support this conclusion,
as well as recent research on the time cost of proposal writing versus that of
producing publishable results. We conclude that an aspirational proposal
success rate of 30-35% would still provide a healthily competitive environment
for researchers, would more fully utilize the scientific capacity of the
community's facilities and missions, and provide relief to the funding agencies
who face the logistics of ever-increasing volumes of proposals.
