In this case (and probably lots of others) the amount of resources needed to make an impact on the problem means that it would never work if the funding was decided through a democratic process. As soon as a committee of people are deciding to where to put resources they decide to share it between a number of worthy causes, and that means none of them get the bulk of what's available. If you have something that's percieved to be a relatively small problem by people it isn't directly impacting every day, that needs a lot of resources to fix it, then it's never getting done.

(Tech-related side note: This is why companies build mountains of tech debt unless there's a former engineer running the show.)