Yes, I'm (not surprisingly :-) ) a fan of increasing federal funding for academic research. Equally important, enough of the funding needs to be in unrestricte

Yes, I'm (not surprisingly :-) ) a fan of increasing federal funding for academic research. Equally important, enough of the funding needs to be in unrestricted, competitively awarded grants for basic science, rather than tied up in huge projects that are someone's hobbyhorse. And dramatically cutting NSF graduate fellowships---something that the NSF will likely do if Trump gets his way with slashing the NSF budget---would obviously be a huge step in the wrong direction. In quantum computing in the US, we have no right to complain right now about the level of federal funding, since almost everyone else has it worse! For us, the limiting factor has instead tended to be tenure-track faculty positions in CS and physics departments. All the funding and brilliant students in the world wouldn't matter if, outside of a few elite universities, the CS departments all said "this is really physics," the physics departments all said "this is really CS," and both treated it as a passing fad that might disappear in a couple years. Fortunately, though, the situation has steadily improved and I expect that to continue. On the whole, I think the fact that Google, Microsoft, and other companies hire so many CS PhDs is good, not bad. That's a big part of what lets us admit lots of talented PhD students, and honestly tell them that their career prospects afterward are good. On the other hand, I think it's also true, as you say, that society could better capture the value of a lot of these people by trying to keep them in the open academic world.