Not that it's corrupt, but incentive structure is suboptimal to say the least, especially for government-funded work. There was a recent blog post / HN thread

Not that it's corrupt, but incentive structure is suboptimal to say the least, especially for government-funded work. There was a recent blog post / HN thread [1] about groups never admitting failure, it's very relevant here. The funding agency has to have a process for vetting applications, and what's more reasonable than the ability to manage their own work, i.e. propose a plan and successfully execute on it? Combine it with slow cadence of funding and you have a list of promised results for next 3+ years which you must achieve somehow or you'll never see a grant from that agency again. And they give out a lot of grants, so reviewing reports in detail to be able to distinguish "this result we promised was not achieved because we are incompetent" from "this result is negative, and we need to change direction based on new research" is just infeasible. In commercial research the situation is much better in my experience, probably because your "funding agency" is more narrowly focused and is typically interested in getting useful results. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488641