Only if you're bad at math.
The thing about funding public research generally is that the ROI is extremely high. When something good is free to use then it will be widely used and produce widespread benefits.
Which means that if you spend €30K with the result that local people capture a benefit of €200K and startups in the US capture a benefit of $800K, not funding it is cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're getting back more than you put in regardless of what anybody else is getting.
And the US has the same calculus regardless of what you do. If everyone makes the rational choice then it balances out because everyone is funding research and everyone is benefiting from it (and people rationally fund it in proportion to the benefit they get).
The only reason everyone doesn't is because the benefits are diffusely distributed so public research doesn't have a strong lobby. But you still come out ahead by doing the right thing here regardless of what anybody else does.
Here's an article from Nature looking at the evidence:
This is quite common in economics, but it's especially bad here, because the benefits of research don't inherently result in transfers of currency, and the benefit is actually often to eliminate them. The existence of Linux means that businesses can make broadband routers without having a large internal software team, which means vendors have lower costs and more competition, which means you can get a broadband router for <$100 instead of $1000. That is clearly a useful benefit, but the specifics of it are going to depend on what people do with the surplus $900, which will change over time and cultures and populations in ways that have no relation to the research. There is not going to be any good way to measure that and any measurement is not going to be stable or generally applicable.
But the difficulty in measurement doesn't get you out of having to draw a conclusion, because you still have a decision to make and need something to base it on. So when data is not forthcoming, we use analysis. And the analysis clearly points to research producing large returns, because the product is one that is produced once and can thereafter be used and reproduced arbitrarily many times at negligible cost. It's the classic scenario that justifies governments building roads and infrastructure with tax dollars.
The caveat is that the research has to be useful. It is obviously of no benefit to allocate a crate of cash labeled "research funding" and then transfer it to cronies or apparatchiks. But then the fight isn't over whether we should fund research, it's over how to make sure the money goes to the right place.
It might work out, in the end, but there are things that people may not like about it. Experimenting is good.
For example. It might not play out that way, but I don't see it as impossible either.