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Well, for one example, the biggest funder of such research is the DoD, coming in around 40%. The potential downside of killing them all and letting god determine which are his is that your country's enemies may surpass you in strength and decide to kill all of you and let god determine which are his. This is a threat that may, indeed, be the house of many grifts, but it is entirely possible that those are the stakes. If one cuts everything and then wants to see how the performance of the new system differs from that of the old, how would one measure? You don't get to access the counterfactual.
This is the case for basically all DoD spending in general. You have very few observables to determine the "real" "quality" of the expenditures. They only get meaningfully tested and measured very rarely (hopefully). DoD grift in general is legendary (as it is in every military in the world). Knowing which large acquisition or force structure is going to be useful in future fights is probably just as impossible a task as knowing which research efforts will contribute to future acquisitions/force structures. There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money? Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius? Just stop taking that money from citizens and redistributing it to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people?
Isn't carving out DOD science totally doable and doesn't leave us funding people studying third genders in treefrogs?
Like yes, the government will always be funding some number of stupid people doing stupid things, because they are trained in the proper mouth noises to pretend that some stupid and worthless fish is worth anything. But it seems like we can cut down on absolutely useless science substantially without impacting military projects.
If one wants to, absolutely. But yeah, my main point is that separating the wheat from the chaff in all of these areas is a near-impossible problem. It is plausible to say, "Some areas are important enough that we'll tolerate more graft," but of course, determining which areas are which is a political problem. You may want to preserve DoD research funding, but I don't know if KMC does. He's almost certainly right that there is graft there, too, so you probably have to convince him (or enough folks that have the ear of the President or whatever) to tolerate that graft, because you're probably not going to be able to really distinguish between the good and the bad at a low level.
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