Which government, what country?
El Reg has a wonderfully international readership, but we assume that in general it's written from a UK viewpoint, unless noted otherwise.
Could the authors of articles make it clear which country they're writing from the perspective of? Eventually I worked out that in this case the 'government' that did the funding is the US government, and the National Instituter of whatever is the US National Institute of whatever, which makes more sense of the wild numbers of 'Drunk driving costs thousands of lives every year' - which is rubbish in a UK context. Over the last five years road deaths in the UK attributed to drink driving have been a pretty consistent 240 per year. The UK has some of the safest roads in the world.
But, whinging apart, looks like this could be a useful and effective tool to get that even lower, provided they don't cost an arm and a leg. Issued free by pubs perhaps?