Most research is funded through grants. Many different federal agencies provide grants, as well as private organizations. When applying for a grant, you have to indicate what you're going to spend the money on. And your grant may be rejected if the organization funding the grant thinks you're not going to spend the money well. And if you can't find someone to give you a grant, you probably can't do the research, even if you have tenure.

There are problems with this system. Researchers often have to spend a lot of time writing grant applications, and grants can be rejected for any number of bad reasons. And there are cases where research was funded that probably shouldn't have been funded. But research funding isn't given willy-nilly to whoever asks, and taxpayers wasting money on kooky ideas isn't a particularly big problem.

I understand your reasoning, but our efforts to prevent this is part of why professors spend so much time writing grants and filling out other paperwork these days. It’s better in my opinion to just accept reasonable risk.

I would add that weird ideas can be surprisingly useful; nobody expected research on gila monsters to lead to our most successful weight loss treatment to date.

researchers don’t receive unlimited funding for life, even if they made it into a permanent position. they have to regularly apply for grants, and those applications are reviewed by experts and have to be grounded properly in previous work. it’s just that potential for profit is not a criterion for evaluation, as it is in the private sector

That's why when you apply for grants, they are reviewed by the panels of experts and then you have to report the results/progress. Nobody will just give you money for something crazy.

And yet the grant writing process continues, as the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. I'm glad someone at the DoD thought that ARPANET was a good idea to research so that 60 years later we can argue online about whether the govt is just giving out tax payer money to whoever for any reason.