Definitely fair to call it an over generalization - I grew up in a town with a "private sector" that only existed because of government contracts and have worke

Definitely fair to call it an over generalization - I grew up in a town with a "private sector" that only existed because of government contracts and have worked on pursuing DoD contracts for life sciences applications, and from what I've seen, it's fair to say that creating employment in the US continues to be a very large part of the driving force behind why funding is allocated by the government. The program managers aren't necessarily keeping it front of mind, but the people signing the legislation to give the program managers their funds to manage basically only care about the jobs part, and that bleeds through in a lot of subtle and non-subtle ways