That's only true in a very myopic sense. You don't get the US economy (and all of the benefits that come from that) without science and technology and basic research funding.
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
The R&D figures you're citing are for engineering the latest iPhone, not for figuring out how basic biology works.
Maybe it’s more true in some fields (biotech?)
How is this counted? If it’s based on tax figures, there’s a lot of corporate “R&D” that gets written off that wouldn’t be considered research in an academic setting.
The rise in basic research in industry coincides with the rise of technology as a major component of the US economy decades ago. I suspect these are not unrelated. The growth of deep tech investment by the private sector probably has a lot to do with it.