Your Grant in Review: The “Overambitious” StockCritique

Gerty-Z has a post up musing on the tiredest of StockCritiques™…”The proposal is overambitious…”.
The overall conclusion of the post, and the ensuing comments, was basically that this is totally meaningless and a grant applicant should ignore it. As Comrade PhysioProf put it:

This is pointless. The “too ambitious”/”not ambitious enough” shitte is a red herring.

I agree that this can be a meaningless, throwaway for a reviewer to put in the grant critique. But this doesn’t exactly mean that it is totally meaningless and can be ignored with impunity.

As with all critiques of an original submission of an NIH Grant, this one should be considered closely when you are preparing your revised application. As always, the point is not to win over your confirmed antagonists with your overwhelming response. The point is to give your fans ammunition to shoot down the detractors. So giving some response, any response of halfway decent merit, to the criticisms is a good thing to to.
Personally I have taken the “overambitious” criticism to be a GoodThing because it is a fine opportunity to streamline your proposal by stripping out the extra bits. This has the twin benefits of making it easier to make a smoothly crafted proposal fit within the page limits and leaving you with an Aim that you can use in your next grant proposal. And since, should you get the grant awarded, a grant is not a contract you can do whatever you choose about the deleted bit later. Win/win.
There are also situations in which the StockCritique™ actually does apply, particularly for the n00b. Now obviously opinions vary on whether it should be a detraction that you proposal wildly more experiments than you can possibly complete for the direct costs and duration of funding that you are proposing. After all, if completing half of the proposal would be meritorious, who cares if the rest of the stuff is in the applications? That’s just words. But like it or not, “overambitious” and “cannot be completed in the time proposed” are realities of review. And you job is not to change NIH study section culture all by your lonesome. It is to get your grant funded.
And in my view it is a very common failing of new investigators to want to write what is, in essence, the program grant. To lay out the next 10-15 years of what will be the major backbone of the laboratory. Or to lay out what would have been possible back in the fully functioning postdoctoral lab but just isn’t going to happen for a newly minted assistant professor’s group. My experience, including my own proposal writing I admit, has been that this is found frequently in the first few grants that are written. So the easy dismissals that are going on at Gerty-Z’s and PhysioProf’s blogs need to be taken in some perspective.
If you are a relatively new PI and are getting this criticism of overly ambitious proposals with frequency, it is worth reconsidering your approach to proposals. You may really be jamming too much into your proposals. Or perhaps you need to work on selling a 5-yr plan of what amounts to a limited set of experiments out of all that you can imagine.