While Government funding of science produces many good results it has the down side of politicizing science and the politicization of science is detrimental to science. The benefit is that it provides a source of funding for research making it easier for research to be funded. It obviously allows some research to be done that probably could not get funded other wise.
However science has become too dependent on government grants such that 90% of scientific research is funded by government. To get funding from any source requires you to appease that source of funding. So to get government funding you need to appease government officials. While grant requests do go through peer review, altimetry the money comes from politicians and this has a chilling affect on science because some areas of research are funded while others are not. Furthermore about 1 in 10 unsolicited grant applications are approved which means that some legitimate research is rejected. Also some paradigms are favored by government over competing ones. For example research in to manned caused global warming gets funded while opposing research does not get funded.
The reason for this it that politics is about acquiring and holding on to power not knowledge and as a result politicians are often not really interested is the science but sending money to their districts and pushing a political agenda.
In conclusion science needs to reduce its dependence on Government funding. Priority needs to be given to private funding which can take several forms, foundations, universities, and other nonprofit organizations and for profit organizations while these are already used to some degree, private funding should be encouraged more. It is less corrupting because there is more than one source of funding. This does not mean that Government funding should be eliminated just reduced. Science should be as independent of government as possible to reduce these problems.
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