It doesn't work like that. With basic research, you often have to wait for decades before you can tell if the work was important or useful. But because funding

It doesn't work like that. With basic research, you often have to wait for decades before you can tell if the work was important or useful. But because funding needs to be available before the work is done, you can't base funding decisions on the value of the work. The least bad approach to funding basic research discovered so far is funding a wide range of ideas. And funding them without preconceptions of what is going to be valuable in the future. As long as the researchers are reputable and the ideas don't look like nonsense, they should be considered for funding. Of course, because funding is always scarce, final decisions must be based on subjective judgment. On the other hand, if you only want to fund research you consider important or useful, you are the one making science political. The future is unpredictable. The further away from the present day you go, the more uncertain the predictions become. And as the uncertainty grows, value judgments based on the predictions become less objective and more political.