Bureaucracy Gone Mad

This is pulled from the abstract for a research paper:

Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants for the same money. We anticipate that the net result would be more and better research since more research would be conducted at the critical idea or discovery stage.

This is pathetic. The role of government is to spend on behalf of citizens in areas where individuals don't have the right incentives. You expect government to be a reasonably wise purchaser of services. But this shows that government bureaucracies can be brain dead. It makes no sense to spend more on vetting a purchase than simply making the purchase. Quality control and vetting by nature should be a small cost borne to ensure value for money spent. But when the cost swamps the value, the purchaser -- the government in this case -- has gone brain dead. Pathetic!