Larger than DARPA?

Funding, not funded.

From Wikipedia:

> With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities[0][1].

Note: That budget is ~$10 billion for FY24.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

[1] https://new.nsf.gov/about

DARPA is a funding agency. It employs only admin and program management people, only about 300 of them, and spends around $4B a year, dispersing most of it to universities and third party labs.

It’s leaner than the NSF, which employs five times as many people and has a budget only twice as large. Probably NSF has a large number of small-dollar grants to track compared to DARPA.

And neither of them are the largest research funding agency. The National Institute of Health (NIH) granted $30B on a budget of $41B in FY2020.

The NSF budget is roughly double DARPA’s, at ~$8B vs ~$4B in 2022.

Yes folks, those numbers are suprisingly small.