Twenty years ago when I worked for a FFRDC (Mitre), the number of staff were preallocated for the entire year, and the only decisions were how to allocate personnel onto the pool of candidate projects. As long as you could interest a gov't project manager, you got approval to go ahead with your (their) work. However, our capital expenditures were generally pretty minimal. This model allocated labor almost exclusively.

That's about as liberal an R&D policy as I've seen anywhere.