The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random b

The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs). That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention