science

The federal government is no longer the largest spender in R&D: It funded about 40% of basic research in 2022, while the business sector performed roughly 78% of U.S. R&D. While not a problem in itself, industry has simultaneously withdrawn from open scientific publication over the past four decades, shifting from research toward development. The result is a shrinking pool of openly shared scientific knowledge precisely as public investment in it also contracts.

In US research spending has pretty much served to manufacture monopolies and patents for wallstreet and if they land onto something major, they can then proceed to collect royalties from the world for next X decades. You generally can't patent a new law of nature or something, so of course they shift away from basic research. Too bad the engineering and other sciences need that groundwork too.