Science funding agencies often have programs explicitly aimed at funding high-risk, high-reward science. But the role of peer review in such programs is an open question. After all, in a competitive environment, a consensus approach to peer review might mean that it is difficult to fund anything that is
The deep problem is that things that are high-risk/high-impact are irreducibly unpredictable. If you're far out from under the streetlight you can't confidently tell whether you will or won't find anything. We'd be better off with a system where the top few obvious must-fund grants get funded and the obviously-never-gonna-work grants don't get funded. And then the middle-tier who-the-hell-knows grants go into a lottery. It would be better than relying on timid bureaucrats to make these decisions. With the acknowledgement that I, myself, am a federal bureaucrat. Although I doubt anybody would call me timid.
You could have an officer whose sole purpose is granting funds without peer review.
I recommend this Revisionist History episode
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-powerball-revolution
And the Feng/Cadadevall paper it covers:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mbio.00422-16
The deep problem is that things that are high-risk/high-impact are irreducibly unpredictable. If you're far out from under the streetlight you can't confidently tell whether you will or won't find anything. We'd be better off with a system where the top few obvious must-fund grants get funded and the obviously-never-gonna-work grants don't get funded. And then the middle-tier who-the-hell-knows grants go into a lottery. It would be better than relying on timid bureaucrats to make these decisions. With the acknowledgement that I, myself, am a federal bureaucrat. Although I doubt anybody would call me timid.