During the 80-90s especially, there was an active trend in reducing or even eliminating in-house corporate engineering and R&D staff. For engineering, this meant out sourcing to engineering companies with much lower wage structures plus the owner could turn the spigot on and off. Also, it became not uncommon for multinational engineering companies to have a low cost subsidiary in oh say India for example, for doing bulk, rote work. With R&D, instead of in-house innovation, patents and such, the strategy changed to a much heavier reliance on University contract research, purchasing patents, licensing and consolidation by purchasing emerging companies and mega mergers with competitors. All this put a squeeze on USA STEM professionals that continues.
We are a land of myopic corporate cutthroats.