The whole concept of basic research is that it is inherently wasteful, as the vast majority of decent (as far as anyone can tell before funding) projects will n

The whole concept of basic research is that it is inherently wasteful, as the vast majority of decent (as far as anyone can tell before funding) projects will not yield anything with practical short-term benefits. The projects with large returns can't be seen as rare and special before they are done, it's kind of ordinary and natural for projects which have actual scientific ambition and the potential to yield very large returns to be risky and uncertain; and it's also overwhelmingly common (if we look at historical examples) for the major benefits of the basic research to be impossible to know or describe before that research was done or funded. If you want non-wasteful research, doing only "safe" projects with a clear path to expected results then you are simply committing to never fund any of the research that has the potential to yield very large returns, and not getting those returns. That is the key point - that attempting to eliminate wasteful research is counterproductive and results in throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to say. It has a lot of parallels with VC funding, as with basic research just as with startups you can't tell which projects will "strike gold" before the work is done; you can and should do some basic diligence but if you throw out uncertain projects, then you throw out all of the really good ones as well; all the projects where you are quite sure about the results and can know that they won't be bad are the same projects where you can also know beforehand that they definitely won't be groundbreaking.