Makes me wonder: Are we failing to teach how to apply history to present-day problems, or do we as a society really value history so little?
Most people have incredibly strong attachments to (specific bits) of history. It's often be inseparable from culture, national identity, and religion. However, it's difficult to justify that funding politically over things like building another warship (to keep us safe!), building a supercomputer (to keep us innovative!), or subsidizing corporate entities (to save jobs!). There's also no commercial market for building national identity. Accordingly, most funding comes out of relatively small culture/arts budgets that don't have to answer directly to constituents, except for a very few things that meet the incredibly high bar of direct political support like the national parks and pyramids.
But if you're interested in how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, or how to design a resilient society, or how pandemics spread, you're going to need historical studies at some point.
People see themselves continuously as playing a role in a story than spans millenia. That's what "identity" is really about, and it underlies war, crime, achievement, religion, raising of families, etc.
Historians could be the leaders here, but for whatever reason they are not. Historians haven't put themselves in a position where they could guide human stories for society overall.
So do they have potential value? Yes. But either they aren't able to provide it, or we aren't able to accept it.
Instead we have media narratives, which are a sad substitute.
The new policy seems to be to throw the (digital) archives down the memory hole to avoid lawsuits.