> From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.
Moreover, in WWII we had Turing's code breaking, England's radar, the US proximity fuse, and "the bomb, the ATOMIC bomb".
Then Garwin and Tukey talked, and we got the FFT (fast Fourier transform), talked about the test ban treaty and detecting underground tests.
GPS is nice, but the first version, with the relativity considerations, was done at the JHUAPL for the US Navy missile firing submarines.
Then, as I recall, some people in the US concluded
"Never again will US science operate independently of the US military"
or that since WWII nearly all the reason for all the science funding -- Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence-Berkeley, Stanford Linear Accelerator, Fermi, Brookhaven, Hanford, JHUAPL, NASA, along with DOE and NSF funding of academic research in the STEM fields at Berkeley, U. Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, etc. -- was intended for US leadership in the STEM fields and, thus, US national security.
Bluntly put.
Right, Simons funds a lot. And Hopkins has the Whiting School of Engineering from the widow of Whiting of Whiting-Turner Construction, etc.
Also the semiconductor industry, and ultimately the Silicon Valley, had their origin in WWII, in the great effort for developing technologies for making germanium and silicon crystals with extremely low levels of impurities and defects, which were needed for diode detectors in radars.
The vacuum diode detectors used in radios before WWII did not work at the high frequencies required in radars. Most of the work for semiconductor technologies had been done at Bell Labs, which after the war used this for developing other semiconductor devices.
Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.