The article makes many good points: basic science research is immensely valuable, and society gets enormous (outsized) returns on this investment.

However, I feel the implied argument: DOGE investigating science funding and talking about cuts is bad seems flimsy. The system of funding and incentives is pretty broken, and not only broken, but actively decaying, you can't increase your return by increasing the funding and a lot of the money is spent on actively harming science (e.g., funding bureaucracy, or unmeritoricatic ideology rather than science).