There are multiple elements to issuing grants. It's not simply moving money around from one line item to another. If agencies have been gutted or don't have the budget, then can't write requests for grant proposals or can't offer what they don't have.
Citation needed.
Yours truly, Rip Van Winkle.
Defense contractors would start pulling out the cost-saving technologies, etc that they've been sitting on to win bids, now that there's less money in the pot. Cost-plus contracts are whack, man.
Source: Way back when, worked in industrial augmented reality, and some colleagues came from defense (ship building) because of exactly this issue. Their prior employer had (quietly) pioneered various uses of AR in ship assembly, which drastically reduced costs, but wasn't actually deploying it because cost-saving actually reduces their profits, so they only actually use them when it comes time to win bids.
Pretty sure you're fishing for "we get attacked" tho, which I neither agree with, nor have the background to coherently argue against.
What is the conversation around science funding meant to look like? Spending money on productive investments is a great idea, but the practice of the US government is nowhere near that.
This year's Nobel prize for chemistry went to three Americans (edit: I was mistaken, one of them was living in the USSR when his initial discovery was made, though he now lives in the US). Both the winners of the Nobel prize in medicine were American. and one of the three winners of the Nobel prize in physics was American. By what metric are we "nowhere near" productive in how we fund research?
Spending as a % of budget. I feel that was obvious given the article.
I suspect you're reading something that I didn't write though - I'm just pointing the US government doesn't have spare money lying around to increase their funding of science projects. It isn't a case of "oh we'll just budget a bit more for science". There are enormous cuts/tax increases needed before that conversation can even begin.
If you look far enough out, the future is scary. If nothing else eventually we get hit by a meteor. So people generally don't look forward more than a week or few - because it is unpleasant and seems a little pointless. They live with whatever seems like a good idea right now. I just wish they'd let people who are a bit more math-oriented take on budgeting decisions. We're going to be eating consequences that we didn't have to because the US public can't sit down and agree that solvency is more important than whatever distraction came up this electoral cycle.
(1) There is no hard limit to how much dollars the government can issue.
(2) Of course, the government cannot just issue more dollars indefinitely, before Bad Things(TM) start to happen.
However, this (rather trivial) observation tells us nothing about "What is the limit (or rather, range) of how much dollars the US government can issue, before bad things start to happen?" Without explaining how you can estimate such a limit, (US debt / GDP) is just some number: There's no reason to believe that there is some hard, fixed limit X that this number is not meant to exceed.
