As other comments have drawn attention to, it's a shame that the first things to go in any government austerity drive are sciences and things too complicated for the average, TV-educated Joe to care about. Imagine how different the world would be if in the 1940s the UK decided computers had no use outside of war and cut their funding. Or if in the 1960's the US government decided that DARPA should be focusing on cutting costs, not trying to connect these computer machines together over this network they'd been working on...