Interesting that you bring up WWII. There's a theory that says that US's big research funding agencies are deliberately set up the way that they are because the US government freaked the _fuck_ out upon realizing that a bunch of nerds could go from zero to nuclear bombs in ~10 years. So, these big bureaucracies were set up to, in effect, keep tabs on physicists. (I first heard of this from a talk from Kim Stanley Robinson of Red Mars fame, and more recently Ministry for the Future. It's on YouTube somewhere but it's a bit hard to find, it was a seminar he gave at Duke University some 15 years ago.)

Then, some 35 years later came the Bayh-Dole act, which however well-meaning it might have been, really provided the incentives for universities to turn into fed money capturing enterprises. The rest is history.