Research funding runs out because nobody controls the drawdown rate. A five-year grant programme spends 60% of its budget in year two and then limps through years three to five on fumes. Universities lose entire research teams to grant cliffs that were visible three years before they arrived but nobody acted on. Laboratories decay because maintenance funding is the first thing cut when budgets tighten. Education budgets are set by political cycles that have no relationship to how long it takes to train a generation.

The structural failure is always the same: long-horizon knowledge systems are funded by short-horizon political decisions. The money arrives in bursts, disappears without warning, and nobody governs the rate at which it is consumed.

Progressive Depletion Minting (PDM) inserts a control layer beneath research and education funding. Grant issuance, programme budgets, and institutional capacity funding are tied to measured depletion thresholds. Release is condition-gated. Contraction runs continuously. A programme cannot burn through its funding in the early years because each successive drawdown makes the next one structurally harder, forcing the budget to last the full duration rather than collapsing into a grant cliff.