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Sorry, but as a grad school STEM student you're already eminently employable, it sucks to possibly be the cohort when the music stops (I do not think that will happen here) but the government isn't obligated to dump money in it. As someone who went through grad school unfunded, the whole system is quite unequal, but I saw funded people fail to complete their degrees and still do very well with ABD. I know the argument is that the funding gets people (including smart foreigners who will continue to work in the US after graduation) lucrative employment in the US and they will contribute to the 'scientific powerhouse' as you call it, but given how little people's coursework is often used in their later careers, and how an advanced degree just felt more of slog of mortgaging my youth for money later, I think we should look into this credentialism fueled education cost-inflation run amok and ask if there is a better way.
Not only that, but very little of our powerhouse STEM sector comes about because the government funded it, in fact most of the innovations have come from private companies despite government interference.
AI is coming out of private companies, so did much of our Internet companies stating with Amazon and moving through Zillio. Even in the past, most American innovation came from private research firms like Bell Labs or the Edison Labs or Tesla’s company. Modern robotics will come out of Boston dynamics.
At best, the government grant system works well for very basic research into pure sciences. It doesn’t work well to create new technologies that people will actually use. SpaceX has done more to improve space travel than NASA has in 50 years.
The Internet and the WWW both came out of government-funded research though. It's one of the best examples of why government-funded basic research and private-sector R&D are complements, not substitutes.
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You’re not really doing the “no innovations came from basic publicly funded scientific research” thing?
Let’s just take biology: CRISPR, the polymerase chain reaction, green fluorescent protein, huge numbers of basic discoveries that inform things like cancer therapy research, discoveries of new classes of drug such as discovering GLP-1s in Gila Monster saliva, surely one could write a book on all the contributions of the last couple decades.
That’s a ridiculous opinion that basic science with the support of public funding hasn’t contributed anything lately.
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