This is a flaw of capitalism.

The flaw being that cost is everything. And, in particular, the initial cost matters a lot more than the true cost. This is why people don't install solar panels or energy efficient appliances.

When it comes to scientific research, proposing you do a higher cost study to avoid false results/data manipulation will be seen as a bug. Bad data/results that make a flashy journal paper (room temp superconductivity, for example) bring in more eyeballs and prestige to the institute vs a well-done study which shows negative results.

It's the same reason the public/private cooperation is often a broken model for government spending. A government agency will happily pick a road builder that puts out the lowest bid and will later eat the cost when that builder ultimately needs more money because the initial bid was a fantasy.

Making costs more visible is a good goal, I just don't know how you accomplish that when surfacing those costs will be seen as a negative for anyone in charge of the budget.

> for example, in funding experiments chasing after worthless science

This is tricky. It's basically impossible to know when an experiment will be worthless. Further, a large portion of experiments will be worthless (like 90% of them).

An example of this is superglue. It was originally supposed to be a replacement glass for jet fighters. While running refractory experiments on it and other compounds, the glue destroyed the machine. Funnily, it was known to be highly adhesive even before the experiment but putting the "maybe we can sell this as a glue" thought to it didn't happen until after the machine was destroyed.

A failed experiment that led to a useful product.

How does someone budget for that? How would you start to surface that sort of cost?

That's where I think the current US grant system isn't a terrible way to do things, provided more guidelines are put in place to enforce reproducibility.