Are you sure about that? Most people miss the fact that a sizeable % of our military budget is slated for research grants/funding.

I'm a physicist in academia, and the amount of money we have gotten from DoD branches for things that have no immediate military applications is like 40-60% of our budget YoY. Like for straight fundamental physics research.

Most scientists I know who have gone to Europe have had to go into the private sector. And the famous ones I work with have gotten like blank check $10M offers from max planck and directorships with guaranteed $1m/yr funding, and still turned them down.

The US spends less on academic research than the OECD average. See, for example, https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/academic-r-d-internatio...

From a European perspective, the most noticeable sign of this is the scarcity of postdocs at American universities. Some fields and individual labs are better funded, but on the average, the universities lean heavily on students doing the actual research.

They are referring specifically to research funding for people employed in academia. The US funds a huge amount of research outside of academia.

A large percentage of the US DoD research budget is going to researchers outside of academia, for example. This includes a lot of relatively pure research with no immediate military application.