Entitlement spending
Such as "entitlements". The military budget, even with the war funding, is still not all that high by post WW-II standards. Of course the NASA and other science budgets are in the crapper. Even "small limited government" Thomas Jefferson saw the need for "exploration", in his case that meant sending Lewis & Clark out on their mission of discover, today it means pushing the envelope in all the natural sciences, not just the ones that are seen as immediately useful.
Those should mostly be funded by the industries and individuals who stand to benefit. It's the "we don't know what it might good for stuff", like quantum mechanics that later led to masers and lasers (once called a solution looking for a problem), as well as all the solid state electronics goodies we enjoy or curse today, that should be funded by governments and philanthropists.
philanthropist are in china opening plants there
to the benefit of their military not ours
How can we spend money on particle physics research when there are more pressing issues......like Global Warming.