Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an incentive problem. People tend to game any system based on how there measured. And PHD's are generally measured by how much they publish as well as how quickly they publish. Take two academics that publish the same finding 3 months apart and it's the guy who published first who becomes famous. But, there are a lot more PHD's out there than famous ones so for the most part it's #of papers that's most important…
How do you fix this, assuming you're constrained by the same amount of resources? My sense is the end game should be encouraging long term research where there is a decent enough chance for success relative to the gains from it - the chances are hard to determine but somewhat based on the idea, and the team chasing it. Essentially this is a VC model for ideas that are too far out to generate attractive returns.
Require Journals to Publish the first 2 studies that try and reproduce a given result. Note: Publish need not mean include in the paper copy's just indexed and searchable online. This let's you create a reproducibility index which might not mean much until they have done a fair bit of research but still something there going to keep in mind.
Funding agency's would need to set aside a large amount to validate any study. However, as there is a lot of null results that the percentage is probably not all that high. More importantly as not doing so means the results are practically worthless in the first place it's still a good idea even if it takes 1/2 the overall budget.