The problem is that the price system is the best resource allocation scheme that humans have ever attempted at scale.<p>When you sever the external link between the product going out, and the money coming in, you destroy some of the positive or negative feedback loops that take into account what people actually <i>want</i> and what they can <i>do</i>.<p>There has to be a hard external link between the outputs and the inputs, or you end up with a situation where rent-seekers charge in and gum up the works, absorbing resources without doing anything <i>economically useful</i> in exchange.  The instant you guarantee a cash flow independent of actual results, you create sinecures, and those offices fill up and never go vacant again.<p>You could end up with situations where the agency <i>cures</i> a disease, but spends 100 times more doing that than it would cost to develop an <i>acceptably effective treatment</i> and also create a foundation that could pay to produce and distribute that treatment to everyone who gets it any time within the next 5 billion years.<p>Yay, woo, we cured it.  But our inability to effectively prioritize resources meant that 99% of that cure budget was <i>not</i> spent on researching diseases that have a far greater economic impact.  Oops.<p><i>Someone</i> has to decide whether the money is well spent.  And if that <i>someone</i> isn&#x27;t <i>everyone</i>, then there is an agency problem, and rent-seekers scramble over each other to be the <i>someone</i>, so they can easily profit from that decision-making power.<p>Now, before anyone goes shaking their pompoms for the free market, I should mention that we haven&#x27;t actually had one in medicine for a <i>long</i> time, thanks to the godawful market distortions that currently exist in the healthcare sector of markets where most treatments are researched.  But at least that market-side link in the feedback loop still exists to some tiny extent, no matter how weak or tenuous it may be now.<p>So an independent research agency would be great for about 15 years.  After that, it will start to become a gigantic black hole of waste and inefficiency.