Reconsidering the "too many mouths at the NIH Grant trough" hypothesis

I keep mulling over the data presented in this entry at the Rock Talk blog. I originally concluded that this, combined with the revelation that applications-per-PI only went from 1.2 to 1.5 across the FY98-FY11 interval, showed that the RealProblemTM at the NIH was the growth in the number of Principal Investigator mouths at the [...]