How so? It is, I suppose, pushing an ideology that everyone should support education, research, clean air, and safe roads, but any belief in some sort of universal good must rely on an ideology, if only circularly on the ideology that there is such a thing as a universal good.
Another good argument against our subsidy of education (although maybe not against research) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
I don't really agree, and I am surprised there are people here who would argue against funding research.
What's actually happening is that most of the wealth and tax revenue is generated by the coastal metropolitan areas of the US, which basically subsidize the rural inland regions of the country. Things like Medicare which those same rural folks vote against. This is because the amount of wealth generated by science and technology vastly outweighs what is being generated by rural areas of the country.
Now we cut off the pipeline and investment into those wealth generating areas so that long term, the nation will head into decline...
You see this in both Russia and the United States, where these rural and ethnic minority areas of seem to gladly send their children off to war. Liberals like to think this is some sort of quasi-genocidal policy when it applies to the Buryats or the Tuvans, but if you watch the videos of the guys shipping off to war, their happy and smiling.
They are happy because they are getting a paycheck! Same deal with illegal immigration in the United States. Christian values are to "do unto others as you would have done to yourself", but Christian conservatives all vote to brutalize immigrants and cut social services (which are all subsidized by California anyways!). Why is this?
It's because going to war is a way to get a paycheck in an arguably less shameful way than living off the dole, and kicking illegal immigrants out is kicking out the competition for low wage jobs.
People absolutely are voting for their wallets, but in such a way that they don't live with the shame of taking handouts.
The correct solution is to tax the disproportionately wealthy oligarchs of those coastal vampire companies... the tech monopolies which implicitly levy taxes on all online transactions (Google's 30% cut on android apps, Google's 70% cut on all advertising, Steam's 30% cut on all PC games, Amazon's cut on all online shopping transactions), then reinvest that money into rural industries to make manufacturing competitive. Instead the solution has been to levy a tax on all consumers over all trade, which tends to make local manufacturing less competitive over the long run.
The author (and Nature) pretends like those aren't real problems and that scientists should get unconditional support. That's never been the case.
TFA seems to say "This is important and we shouldn't cut general funding", but also goes on to call on industry, in particular large tech company CEOs to push back against ideologically driven funding cuts. That toes the line of calling for political responses.
There are currently existing ideologies in power in some countries (e.g. in Argentina, not everything is about the US!) that stand for de-funding health, education and basic science and research, and anything that is not of immediate use for businesses. It's a self-defeating ideology (because business do benefit from basic research in the long term), but it does exist today.