A House member on a 2-year term gains nothing from funding a discovery that pays off in 2050. An OMB director optimizing this year's budget has every reason to cut the runway, knowing the crash arrives after they leave.
I watch this in my own lab. The carbon fiber microelectrode (Nature Materials 2012) drew on decades of materials science. The foreign body response work explaining why brain implants fail came from basic glial biology that had zero engineering application when funded.
The current collapse is not trimming edges, it is shortening the runway. New competitive awards down 74%. NOFOs from 756 to 14. Early-career investigators, the people who lay the next runway, are leaving or never entering, thereby cutting off planes we cannot yet see.
Basic science is the runway, technology is the plane. You can see the plane. You cannot see the runway it needed. The gap between laying runway and liftoff runs 20 to 30 years, which is what makes basic science politically disposable.
Every technology that reshaped medicine in the last 50 years traces to basic science with no obvious application when funded. MRI from spin physics. CRISPR from bacterial immunity. mRNA vaccines from 20 years of lipid nanoparticle work the field called a dead end.