> I haven't, but I'm unclear why it's relevant given that you don't seem to really be disagreeing!

It's relevant because you are criticizing the process but you don't seem to understand how it actually works. Your original characterization was that grant money is "this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used." The reality is, when I get grant money I need to account for how every dollar is spent, and if there are ever any questions about spending, I better have the receipts to back it up. The other reality is, I only get to spend a small fraction of a grant award, as the University takes most of it off the top, and my students take almost all the rest in the form of a tuition remission and a stipend, leaving whatever is left over for equipment and conference costs. Then there are strict conflict of interest regulations which come with their own reporting requirements. I don't even get all of the money at once; I'll get some up front and then I have to show significant midterm progress in order to get more. There's accountability at multiple layers by multiple organizations.

> The NSF denies 80% of grant applications because there is a radical oversupply of people who want to be scientists and the NSF has a finite budget.

It's accountability in the form of: if you didn't do what you promised you'd do, then you don't get any more money and your career is derailed. Isn't that what you want? Anyway, do we have an oversupply of scientists relative to the amount of science that needs to be done? I don't think so. The NSF budget is finite, but it's also embarrassingly miniscule given the upside of research that has come out of NSF funded projects.

> If it existed it would look like this ... We will therefore prosecute you for research fraud and failure to meet the terms of your contract.

Fraud is one thing. I'm not going to say we shouldn't prosecute fraud. But treating a grant proposal like a contract with positive deliverables (no negative results allowed) is the exact problem. Research is not development. Research implies failure. You can't do one without the other. Failure to meet stated objectives shouldn't be met with prosecution. That just further incentivizes fraud.

If there's a replicability crises it just means we need to spend money on replication research. Researchers know no one is going to bother replicating their study because there is no grant money available for redoing someone else's research. Grant agencies don't pay for that kind of thing, and you can't make a career doing that kind of research. No one gets tenure this way. If we want studies to be replicated, we need to allocate money to replicate them, and we need to incentivize people to do so by making it a viable career for a Ph.D.

> Lots of people, non scientists included, have high expectations for results placed upon them. The right mechanisms and incentives to stop fraud are not simply having low expectations of scientists, that's absurd and wouldn't be seriously proposed as a solution in any other area of society.

I didn't say we should have low expectations, I said we should have realistic expectations, and yes, that does involve lowering expectations from where they are right now. Because the current expectation is this: you have to write a proposal that has a <20% chance of getting funding. If you can't get that funding your career is basically over, so you better promise the world, because everyone else is. In this proposal you need to lay out a research plan for the next 3-5 years and you have to convince the funding agency that your research is going to change the world as we know it. If within that time you fail to meet your stated objectives, you will find funding hard to come across, and your tenure will be threatened, meaning you will probably lose your job and have to move your family. On top of that you want to add potential federal prosecution to stakes, thinking that will make things better.

> Expectations on scientists are already rock bottom .. The solution to fraud is tighter contracts to ensure the rules are clear, and systematic prosecutions of people who break them.

Okay, run with this idea: exactly what rules need to be clearer and exactly how do the contracts need to be tightened? Because there are already clear rules and tight contracts, yet the problem persists. Will clearer rules and tighter contracts fix it? How?

I'll tell you what I think will happen with this system: you'll chase out all of the public scientists because the stakes are too high. Already the pay is too good on the corporate side, and now you add potential federal prosecution to the list if I don't meet positive deliverables? No thanks. I'll go work for Microsoft where my research will be privatized. You might be okay with this as you pointed out you believe a profit motive is good for research, but you know who wouldn't be good with this? Microsoft. And Google. And all the other tech companies who were (or will be) built on top of technologies that started as government funded research. All this does is make Microsoft stronger. Is that what we want? What about the next Microsoft or Google? Where will they come from?

I'll give you a concrete example of where your idea fails: the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. Millions were spent trying to bootstrap autonomous cars, and what was the result? They all crashed, no one completed the race. What should the response have been, to prosecute everyone involved? No, they tried again and gave everyone more money. Next time around in 2005 more succeeded (mostly because they relaxed the expectations).

Then in 2007 we saw the first real demonstration of autonomous cars in the DARPA Urban Challenge. Today, everything Tesla, Google, GM, Ford, et al. are doing with driverless cars is based on the research that happened in 2004-2007. Without government funded autonomous car research, there would be no Tesla or Waymo today. That's how research works, you try, you fail, you try again, and you have no idea how far your impact will be, and really no one does. If we try to control this process toward producing only successes with contracts and positive deliverables, like it's an engineering project (with prosecution of failure and all), it just means we're going to lose dynamics like the Grand Challenges, and the broader economy will suffer for it.

Take all that money you want to invest in prosecutors, courts, lawyers, and prisons, and invest that in a system where replication studies are well funded and a viable career path for scientists. Increase funding into the NSF and other grant funding agencies to hire more people to consider grants, and increase grant throughput. I guarantee you you'll fix a lot of the problems you're identifying.