It's good to have reasonable goals and a budget, even if some of them aren't met. The funders absolutely know what they are doing and handicapping a replication effort because it went a few thousands over budget would be outrageous. There are still unknown quantities at play here, a large scale replication effort hasn't been attempted before and those efforts themselves - the extent of the effort required to replicate and the impact of failure - are also goals. Failure results, of which there have been several already now, can severely damage the reputation of prestigious journals and teams of scientists. They're not doing this because replication is popular, or cheap or because they thought it would be a fun afternoon lark.
