Really? IMO as a former Ph.D. academic who chose industry because there was no future there, science funding in America has dried up into a shriveled husk of its former self in an age of bottomless pockets for overseas military adventures and an educational system that isn't creating the next generation we need.
So we're left with mostly Elon Musk to carry the embers of our space program while Craig Venter, Google and a few other companies are increasingly taking on aging research, something I think will ultimately have enormous returns in the private sector. Just not in time for next quarter's results so David Einhorn (and his net worth of 1/40th that of Bill Gates) can go @#$% himself.
And for all the supposedly wasted public money on science cited by conservative sorts that got us here, it's trivial to find yet another dead-end weapons system or overseas military adventure that cost the taxpayers exponentially more.
To be fair, there is the Connectome Project ($100M annually) and also the Exascale Project ($126M) but those won't even cover the cost of a single F-22 fighter jet ($339M).
Does SpaceX have any contracts that aren't for the U.S. government? Aren't most of their aeronautical engineers former NASA employees? I'm sorry to get stuck on the Elon Musk side comment, but NASA is still doing really important stuff such as the Mars rover, comet landing, etc.
Defense R&D spending is way higher but nondefense spending is still keeping up with inflation [1]. There are some agencies who have had reduced budgets, such as National Institutes of Health, while DoE and NSF have enjoyed increased budgets. [2]
Overall I find your post hyperbolic and not consistent with the stats and figures. I'm assuming that your university's research was defunded and that's why you have adopted this world view. It's consistent with your experience but I believe that it doesn't represent funding in general.
I'd throw stupid money at NASA any day, just maybe not so much for manned exploration until it's cost-effective. We both want more space probes I suspect.
But from the above articles, I see two trends.
From (1) Nonmilitary science funding has been effectively flat for a decade while military research was increasing annually roughly until a year or so into the Obama administration.
From (2) and its responses, the money itself is being misallocated to the top (just like everywhere else) and also into a metastasizing tumor of administrators:
I've never heard this take before, can you elaborate?