Research

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   The system of giving research grants for a particular project is counterproductive, it undermines how research is actually done.
   Research involves coming up with ideas and then evaluating them, making a commitment to one course of study does not help the situation.  It makes far more sense to give a grant over time, 3 years would be good, to an individual who shows promise in doing research.  At the end of the 3 years the individual's work would be evaluated; any additional grant would either be; cancelled, continued or increased.  The evaluation would be a peer reviewed process.  There is a danger of a buddy system forming and the evaluators all helping each other, but it is still the best possible system.  The only defense against it becoming corrupted is to audit the process, the difficulty there is that the only people who can do an effective audit are the same people who do the peer reviews.  That means, ultimately, that there has to be ahope of finding enough qualified reviewers to dilute friendships and hope they are interested enough in integrity to report suspicious clusters of mutual rewards.
    The current system is to grant money for a specific project,  Thee are several problems with this: The project may turn out to have little chance of success, in which case, the researcher can give the money back and lose the ability to hold research staffs together or keep doing the research, even knowing it will be a failure.  There is also the very fact that it defies how people think.  A researcher may start doing some work and realize a side issue may be more interesting, under the current system he risk jail if he diverted money to something which might ber more productive.  Another failure is that it prevents the flexibility of researchers to pool money and divide work.  By giving time granted money, these problems are obviated.  The researcher has the freedom to pursue any item of interest, although it might not produce a renewed grant.
   The goal of steering grants to areas considered to be of high interest can be achieved by blocking the renewal grants.  For instance, in medical research,  50% of the renewal grants could be designated for those who did the best cancer related research.  That would motivate researchers to work on cancer since all of the other research areas are going to be competing  for the other 50% of the money.  The odds of being renewed for non-cancer research would be lower than for cancer research, motivating researchers to try to do cancer research.  However, they would be free to pursue any interesting work and still have a chance of renewal.  In the long run, it will produce better over-all research.
   The money itself needs to be traceable to prevent theft, so all disbursements would have to be issued by a control officer and be clearly identified as to the recipient.