> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government. Did... you actually read the comment y

> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government. Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap. The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.