For better or for worse, President Eisenhower greatly facilitated the scientific elite's ascendancy within the US government by creating agencies such as NASA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and the President's Science Advisory Committee.
Sort of.
The larger issue predates Ike, back to WWII, FDR and (among other things) the Manhattan Project.
There was a desire to continue government management (which could be read as control) of the nation’s main sciences endeavors. Which had produced things like the Atomic Bomb.
However FDR and his advisors knew that after the war the public wouldn’t tolerate the continued nationalization of the sciences, outside of a few national laboratories.
So they decided that the best way to keep the brain trust intact, and pointed in the “right” directions, was to have the sciences post-war devolved back out of direct wartime government control and back into the universities, but with a short leash provided via government grants and other funding mechanisms.
It was this larger issue that Ike was talking about.
Congress has the responsibility to restrain all of these agencies.
Instead, Congress keeps bowing to the loudest ‘activist’ voices and funneling money to these agencies without restrictions.
Added to that, we have Administrations which pander to various groups.