One of the important functions of a government is to act as a backstop for capital-intensive investments with long-term ROIs. The interstate highway system started as Eisenhower's proposal, GPS and the moon mission were funded to one-up the Soviets, Arpanet/Internet was a DoD brainchild, and so on. All of that was enabled by Congresspeople who were willing to carve out a good chunk of the federal budget for large-scale, high-risk, long-tail-reward projects. That sort of thinking has not existed in Congress for some time (least of all during the current "starve the NSF" administration).