Well, that and the faux-/manufactured outrage from US Congress. Things like Coburn's waste book were designed to lampoon and degrade seemingly silly or wasteful basic-science research from just a cursory overview of the title or cherry-picked facts. That's part of a larger agenda alongside cutting basic research for cuts-sake, but it means that everyone in science is searching for a justification for even the most meager of funding. Human biomedical health is a good target—if you can come up with any plausible link, your odds of funding are better (maybe)—and I suppose robots aren't a bad one either.

The NSF has a list of responses to various such things: <https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/wastebooks>