What is the historical picture of funding basic research? Would like your perspective.
The recent history is
1) WAR funded a lot of basic research.
2) a clear identifiable goal like the moon.
As to funding, I remember Govt gave lumps sums to National Science Foundation to go through peer review process. Then it was found that was too political and congress decided to fund research directly through legislation. That fixed it. What problem were we talking about?
What makes you think the “less political part” got fixed?
NSF is very political and has “favorites”. Also now its heavily infested with Chinese nationals working as “evaluators” & PMs.