Editing Mansfield Amendment (1969) (section)

== Immediate, Measurable Consequences (1969–1975) ==

* DoD basic research obligations in physics and related fields flat-lined or declined in real terms while total federal R&D grew. NSF data (constant dollars) show DoD basic research peaked mid-1960s (~$400–500 million current dollars for all basic, with physics/math a major share) and then stagnated or fell ~25–30% in real terms by mid-1970s, even as NSF's basic research budget doubled.
* The entire ARPA Materials Research Laboratories (MRLs/IDLs) program — ~$30–40 million annually across 12 elite universities — was transferred to NSF in 1971–1972 because DoD could no longer legally fund it.
* University physics departments that had been 70–90% DoD-funded in gravity, field theory, and relativity suddenly lost that support. The "Golden Age of General Relativity" — explicitly dated by historians (Jean Eisenstaedt, Clifford Will, Kip Thorne, Jürgen Renn) as ~1955–1973/75 — ended exactly on the Mansfield timeline. The field went from explosive growth (new exact solutions, global methods, astrophysical applications, dozens of active groups) to near-dormancy outside a few astrophysics niches.

Some of the money moved to the [[National Science Foundation (NSF)|National Science Foundation]], but the rules changed completely:

* Pre-Mansfield (DoD/ARPA): Program managers (e.g., Jack Ruina, Eberhardt Rechtin, Stephen Lukasik) could fund brilliant iconoclasts for decades on hunch alone. No peer review panels, no consensus requirement, no short-term deliverables.
* Post-Mansfield (NSF): [[Peer Review|"Peer Review"]] (already strengthening since 1965), requirement for "sound preliminary data," punishment of paradigm deviation, obsession with citation counts and "safe" incrementalism.

The result was immediate risk-aversion. Proposals that might discover fundamentally new ideas, overturn entrenched views or disrupt preexisting academic expectations became un-fundable because they couldn't guarantee results in 3 years or satisfy reviewers wedded to existing paradigms.