This article has me extremely confused. They keep talking about a dearth of R&D spending relative to the rest of the world and then present a graph that says we

This article has me extremely confused. They keep talking about a dearth of R&D spending relative to the rest of the world and then present a graph that says we are basically keeping up and have been at about the same level compared to most countries since 1995. Am I missing something here? Is the lack of funding rickety? That all of it is moving into the "D" rather than the "R"? Is there a distinction, or are we just "feeling" like laggards without a good key metric to represent it?