[pseudohadamard]

> Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff?

We already do. They're called grants committees and similar, and have been around for decades. They're slow, bureaucratic, and self-defeating since it's so much work and so little chance of winning a grant that everyone submits massively over-valued bids in order to make it worthwhile. However they do put a lot of effort into (trying to) make sure that only legit funding allocations are made.