* DARPA conducted classified military research, which kept Congress on a need-to-know basis. Thus DARPA projects avoided having to spread the pork or to hire a P.R. staff to maintain viability.
* DARPA contracts were awarded by competent technical experts on a merit basis without much political consideration. DARPA also had a "customer," the Pentagon, that had at least a long-run interest in the usefulness of what it funded.
* DARPA tended to fund a large number of small programs, rather than wasteful megaprojects. The agency was on the right side of the economic tradeoff that demands the sacrifice of 1,000 chances to fund the next Bill Joy/Sun Microsystems in order to fund one superconducting supercollider.
Unfortunately, today's ARPA, the non-defense version of the old DARPA, is drifting back into politics. Members of Congress fantasize about "dual use" (military and commercial) technology, with the hope of picking losers and winners, the latter preferably in their districts. There are debates about where the "retraining" funds should be spent when military programs are shut down.
Some of this is inevitable--ARPA's mission is hazier and more politicized than DARPA's. But the agency's best chance for success is if Congress leaves it alone, allowing it to set technical priorities and give out thousands of small grants to universities based only on a peer-review meritocracy.
The new Congress has an opportunity to shrink the federal government and simultaneously help America's technology industries. It involves getting politics out of the laboratory and supporting education on a non-partisan, merit basis.
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