--- Edit: also, the movement to close down DoE and cut NASAs budget certainly WAS created by American oligarchs like the Koches. They have created a propaganda machine to push for tax cuts for the rich. And part of the propaganda, pushed by outlets funded or controlled by GOP billionaires, like Fox, Limbaugh, Cato(founded as Koch), Sinclair, Heritage, SPN, Cit U, Jud Watch, Bradley, Searle, etc etc. is that we need to shrink government (so we can cut taxes on the rich.)
One description of that strategy is here [1] Today’s Republican Party is the party that those activists made. Congressional Republicans who came up in the populist tax revolts of the 1970s abandoned the old party orthodoxy of balanced budgets and rebranded themselves as the tax-cutting party. They embraced the idea that deficits don’t matter as long as those deficits result from Republican tax cuts.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans-tax-c...
Are you implying that the USSR spent a smaller percentage of tax revenue on the war effort?
But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.
The politicians today who are cutting NASA's budget, talking about shutting down DoE, etc. aren't simply victims of Koch propaganda or disbelievers in the enlightenment - they just no longer have political cover for publicly funding research to the same extent that it was funded previously. Nobody believes that the US is at a technical disadvantage against the people we're currently at war against. They still have the political cover to fund the military itself, which continues to get large amounts of funding from political parties that generally want to lower taxes, but that base won't let them fund basic research as much as it did in the past.