Federal grants and contracts make graduate education and research possible.
That includes, for example, research that led to all those new cancer treatments.
For example:
https://www.dana-farber.org/everywhere
Few taxpayers would vote to curtail this!
We’re throwing around a lot of tax dollars. There’s a lot of wasteful spending.
Yes there are results from the money though the article picked out a few of the worse examples. Federal tax revenue goes to corporate entities for research as well. I wonder how smart we are about funding and avoiding giving research dollars to researchers from hostile regimes. That is an important topic for many articles.