The first two paragraphs are FUD and can be safely skipped. The second paragraph sets up a straw-man. After that, however, the rest of the article seems to be

The first two paragraphs are FUD and can be safely skipped. The second paragraph sets up a straw-man. After that, however, the rest of the article seems to be a good-faith attempt at defending general public funding of science. It does use the straw-man as a crutch a few times, and it neatly avoids the real problems like the slew of reworded papers on known junk science, or the ideologically targeted wolf-in-science-clothing research that clogs "the pipeline." It doesn't change my opinion that the pipeline appears to need a hard reset.