let me give you a legitimate answer to this: bureaucrats. no, i am not kidding. imagine you pay for 5 bureaucrats at a rate of 60k a year. these people count beans and make decisions on how money is spent, or talk to other people about how the money is spent. they make you fill out forms for the sake of accountability. they don't do science. they exist to keep track of vacation time and tell the business owners (in this case, the government) how the people doing the actual work are doing their job, for how much, the supplies they need, on what schedule it's going to be done, and why the company should fund it. when you want to have your hamster dogfighting arena, these bureaucrats want to know exactly what you need in painstaking detail. even if you know exactly what you need and can justify everything, it takes them at least two weeks for them to assess and approve it, and then two more for you to actually get any of it. more likely, they take longer to find "ethically sourced" murder rodents and have to negotiate with multiple stakeholders about getting them delivered in an accountable fashion. more likely, it takes two to ten times as long. they need to set aside a room for you, they need to assess who the best experimenters are, one of their guys is on vacation, some executive needs to sign off on it, you need to painstakingly write an essay to a government agency about how gladitorial gerbil fights are actually really important. the government needs to sign off on all the drugs you use. then you do this stupid fucking gerbil experiment in painstaking detail and account for literally everything. it takes your dudes a month to actually run the tests because you need to run a lot of tests, and that's if everything goes well. hopefully, the bean counters are gainfully working, otherwise they're dead weight. then, when you're done, they want to assess your performance, the expenses, lessons learned, and maybe hold a pizza party.
United States