Halting Increased Ministry Budgets Through R&D Preliminary Feasibility Studies

Ministry of Science and ICT Finalizes Reform Plan for Preliminary Feasibility Study System of National R&D Projects
Limited Within New Available Budget of Ministries
Exemption from Preliminary Feasibility Study Also Pursued for Urgent Challenges and Innovative R&D

The government has devised measures to prevent ministries from abusing the preliminary feasibility study system at the ministry level to ensure the fair execution of the national research and development (R&D) budget. Additionally, exemptions from preliminary feasibility studies will be pursued for urgent challenge-driven and innovative R&D projects.

On the 16th, the Ministry of Science and ICT held the first National R&D Project Evaluation General Committee meeting of 2024 and deliberated and approved the "Reform Plan for the National R&D Project Preliminary Feasibility Study System," which centers on these contents.

The reform plan limits the scale of R&D preliminary feasibility study requests to within the range of each ministry’s newly available budget. This puts a stop to the practice of expanding ministries’ R&D budgets through preliminary feasibility study requests that greatly exceed the available budget. Ministries applying for preliminary feasibility studies must present feasible funding procurement plans.

However, preliminary feasibility studies for challenge-driven and innovative R&D projects with high uncertainty will be restructured to allow project planning to be supplemented through expert reviews during the preliminary feasibility study process or to enable R&D activities to proceed. The basis for exempting nationally urgent challenge-driven and innovative projects from preliminary feasibility studies will be clarified, and active consideration will be given to such exemptions.

Ongoing projects that integrate and re-plan R&D projects below the preliminary feasibility study scale conducted by each ministry will also be subject to preliminary feasibility studies. To reduce administrative burdens such as project management issues and excessive planning and evaluation, only large-scale ongoing projects will be subject to preliminary feasibility studies.

The reform plan was prepared to reflect the national R&D innovation direction pursued by the "Yoon Seok-yeol Government’s R&D Innovation Plan." The number of major R&D projects, which was 426 in 2015, tripled to 1,266 over eight years. This plan underwent a public opinion gathering process through online and offline public hearings in December last year. The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to revise the preliminary feasibility study operation guidelines and general guidelines and apply them in earnest starting March.

A Ministry of Science and ICT official explained, "We will continue efforts to find unique preliminary feasibility study methods considering the characteristics of R&D projects."

Meanwhile, on the same day, the National R&D Project Evaluation General Committee passed the preliminary feasibility study for the "Biofoundry Infrastructure and Utilization Base Construction Project," which will invest 126.3 billion KRW over five years starting in 2025. The biofoundry construction project, which builds a synthetic biology-based biofoundry to develop artificial cells and bio-materials, saw its investment plan reduced from 700 billion KRW in 2021 to 300 billion KRW early last year, and finally received a budget allocation of only 126.3 billion KRW in the final preliminary feasibility study.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.