Judging progress is easy enough. Trusting the judgment is hard, because the world is small and conflicts of interest are inevitable. People who are established

Judging progress is easy enough. Trusting the judgment is hard, because the world is small and conflicts of interest are inevitable. People who are established experts on a topic generally know each other. Because taxpayers don't want to fund someone's research just because the applicant's friends say so, they need ways of judging the merits without the actual expertise to do so.