Get the government off their backs. The fact is that virtually every successful academic scientist is a ward of the federal government. One cannot do the research necessary to publish enough to be awarded tenure without appealing to one or another agency for considerable financial support. This requires no mean amount of supplication and obedience to, say, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, or the National Science Foundation. They exist to perpetuate themselves, and to expand their territory and their political influence.
Government agencies behave just like people.
The agency goals cannot be accomplished without the largesse of Congress. Thus begins a peculiar back-scratching in which political patrons define a particular problem as The Most Important in History. The list is as infinite as is the predilection for Homo sapiens to have nightmares. All this is well and good for agencies, but horribly destructive of science. For the most progress in science is made when researchers challenge existing paradigms, the most overarching of which is that we are doomed.