So there's an underlying problem here, which is that at our current rate of indictments, our court systems cannot support everyone going to trial. One of the reasons people in charge of funding want to starve the public defenders is that if they're actually good, people will be less willing to just plea out to a lower charge. So the growth will be non-linear as their success rate increases due to the funding, which they now need more of to service the extra cases they get from being good.

One idea is that whoever introduces an expert witness must also pay for the other side's expert witness, up to the cost of your expert. The defense doesn't need to prove anything due to the presumption of innocence, so the defense gets free counter-experts and only have to pay for the counter-expert if they want to bring up an expert about something the prosecution doesn't want to talk about.