At the Good Science Project, we’ve published a number of pieces on reducing the administrative burden on researchers–most recently estimated at a staggering 44% of their research time. See “The Burden of Administrative Compliance,” “The Efforts to Reform Research Bureaucracy To Date,” “Here’s How We Could Get An Extra $2 Billion In Biomedical Research Per Year — For Free,” and “How To Actually Reduce The Administrative Burden On Research.”

There has been some effort in the past to ask federal agencies to use consistent processes, such as proposal formats. While a good idea in theory, I suspect this is mostly a waste of time so far.