I know a retired chemist who said something similar. In order to get funded consistently, you have to be successful every time in getting the results you claime

I know a retired chemist who said something similar. In order to get funded consistently, you have to be successful every time in getting the results you claimed you would on your previous grant application. The only way to be sure you can do that, is to sneak some work on the next grant into the current one. Granting agencies think they are being more efficient, but there's no way to avoid risk in research - they've just pushed it off on the researchers. Researchers need to have some career stability, so they found a way to hand the risk back to the agency, by adding the cost of trying the riskier experiments into the cost of the boring, sure-thing projects. Everybody gets what they want!