In a similar vein, members of Congress love picking through federal grants to find dubious-sounding research funded by the National Institutes of Health or other agencies. In a report titled “The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope,” Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma promised to identify “over $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF.” Mostly, the report just mocks research that, superficially, sounds amusing.

Coburn takes gleeful aim at scientists who’ve been running shrimp on treadmills. According to the scientists, the treadmills cost about $1,000 out of a half-million-dollar grant. The point is to determine whether ocean bacteria are weakening shrimp populations, a development that would tip the entire food chain into chaos. Coburn’s attack is particularly dangerous, because it encourages government researchers to conduct science that sounds good rather than science that does good.

It would be nice if the government’s mistakes were typically a product of stupidity, venality or bureaucracy. Then we would need only to remove the idiots, fire the villains and cut the red tape. More often, the outrageous stories we hear are cases of decent people trying to solve tough problems under difficult constraints that we simply haven’t taken the time to understand. That isn’t to suggest that people in government don’t get it wrong. They do, repeatedly. But if we want to get it right, we need to work harder to understand why they decided to remove the brown M&M’s in the first place.