There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country.

The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-shall-not-be-named came along. SpaceX took the breakthroughs that existed in the US in things like control theory, which the same science establishment had failed to value appropriately.

It doesn't look like the science establishments of any country are actually successfully feeding their innovation machines, or have done so for decades. Switching a non functioning system off does at least allow it to be replaced by something that risks doing things when something comes back.

Of course many pure scientists will, legitimately, argue that innovation isn't the point in the first place, and that is a far more solid point, but real academic diversity has been so destroyed by the global consensus making peer review process that much of their progress has effectively stalled.