(I don't recall why, exactly. Something about how there's a chicken and egg problem, where they wouldn't have enough results to support the grant proposal if they hadn't already been doing the research...)

If the management doesn't like it, they'll figure it out that if you keep coming up with these then you must be spending time on them - continuously. :)

A private Git repo where all the work happens, and a public repo where everything is 3 months old, but history rewritten so the dates are up to date?

And a cron job and scripts to automate it all