People sometimes say there is a crisis of trust in science. In controversial subjects, from ecology to health, increasingly many people are rejecting not only mainstream ideas, but the scientists behind them.

I think part of the problem is media literacy, but not in the way you’d think. When we teach media literacy, we talk about biased sources. If a study on cigarettes is funded by the tobacco industry or a study on climate change is funded by an oil company, we tell students to take a step back and consider that the scientists might be biased.

That’s a worthwhile lesson, as far as it goes. But it naturally leads to another idea. Most scientific studies aren’t funded by companies, most studies are funded by the government. If you think the government is biased, does that mean the studies are too?

I’m going to argue here that government science funding is a very different thing than corporations funding individual studies. Governments do have an influence on scientists, and a powerful one, but that influence is diffuse and long-term. They don’t have control over the specific conclusions scientists reach.

If you picture a stereotypical corrupt scientist, you might imagine all sorts of perks. They might get extra pay from corporate consulting fees. Maybe they get invited to fancy dinners, go to corporate-sponsored conferences in exotic locations, and get gifts from the company.

Grants can’t offer any of that, because grants are filtered through a university. When a grant pays a scientist’s salary, the university pays less to compensate, instead reducing their teaching responsibilities or giving them a slightly better chance at future raises. Any dinners or conferences have to obey not only rules from the grant agency (a surprising number of grants these days can’t pay for alcohol) but from the university as well, which can set a maximum on the price of a dinner or require people to travel economy using a specific travel agency. They also have to be applied for: scientists have to write their planned travel and conference budget, and the committee evaluating grants will often ask if that budget is really necessary.

Actual corruption isn’t the only thing we teach news readers to watch out for. By funding research, companies can choose to support people who tend to reach conclusions they agree with, keep in contact through the project, then publicize the result with a team of dedicated communications staff.

Governments can’t follow up on that level of detail. Scientific work is unpredictable, and governments try to fund a wide breadth of scientific work, so they have to accept that studies will not usually go as advertised. Scientists pivot, finding new directions and reaching new opinions, and government grant agencies don’t have the interest or the staff to police them for it. They also can’t select very precisely, with committees that often only know bits and pieces about the work they’re evaluating because they have to cover so many different lines of research. And with the huge number of studies funded, the number that can be meaningfully promoted by their comparatively small communications staff is only a tiny fraction.

In practice, then, governments can’t choose what conclusions scientists come to. If a government grant agency funds a study, that doesn’t tell you very much about whether the conclusion of the study is biased.

Instead, governments have an enormous influence on the general type of research that gets done. This doesn’t work on the level of conclusions, but on the level of topics, as that’s about the most granular that grant committees can get. Grants work in a direct way, giving scientists more equipment and time to do work of a general type that the grant committees are interested in. It works in terms of incentives, not because researchers get paid more but because they get to do more, hiring more students and temporary researchers if they can brand their work in terms of the more favored type of research. And it works by influencing the future: by creating students and sustaining young researchers who don’t yet have temporary positions, and by encouraging universities to hire people more likely to get grants for their few permanent positions.

So if you’re suspicious the government is biasing science, try to zoom out a bit. Think about the tools they have at their disposal, about how they distribute funding and check up on how it’s used. The way things are set up currently, most governments don’t have detailed control over what gets done. They have to filter that control through grant committees of opinionated scientists, who have to evaluate proposals well outside of their expertise. Any control you suspect they’re using has to survive that.