This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day.
The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.
It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.
I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.