Grants by reviewers had almost no correlation with the quality of the eventual research produced

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 229.   

A particularly intriguing idea is to create a shortlist of grant applications that are all above a certain quality level and then allocate the funding by lottery. Given that the scientific system is supposed to be a meritocracy, this perhaps sounds bizarre. As one set of lottery proponents put it, however, the current system is so bad at allocating money that it’s ‘already in essence a lottery without the benefits of being random’.  An analysis in 2016 found that the scores given to potential US National Institutes of Health grants by reviewers had almost no correlation with the quality of the eventual research produced from the grant (measured by the number of citations it received).  If that’s the case, a substantial portion of the time scientists spend buffing up their grant proposals is wasted. Indeed, by one calculation, ‘the value of the science that researchers forgo while preparing [grant] proposals can approach or exceed the value of the science that the funding program supports’.