Perhaps as individual entities, but I believe grants to college research departments collectively would be a larger dollar amount. I'd have to research it to be sure. There is also the DOE National Labs, e.g. Sandia, Oak Ridge, Fermilab, etc... and NASA. More recently we've been seeing "Challenges" used to get a lot of good research kickstarted on the cheap. For example, the DARPA Grand Challenges in autonomous vehicles, NASA runs several (lunar regolith, space elevator), and the (non government) Google Lunar Challenge, and the reusable private suborbital ride that Scaled Composites won.
US companies benefit from this research. Many of them don't do pure theory research anymore, because the return on investment is too long range to keep Wall Street happy, and that's a sad thing. IBM and Microsoft both dumped large amounts of cash into R&D, and I think it'll start paying off for MSFT in the next couple years.
I bet if we looked at that "where did my tax dollars go" site I posted a few weeks ago, added up every bit of R&D that the government pays for, it'd only be a few dollars out of our pocket. I'm totally OK with that.
H.




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