But, alas, even this trustworthy badge of honor is fraying — and might fall apart.

Whether they are geeks in garages or eggheads in university labs, American entrepreneurs have built their ideas and fortunes on the back of basic research supported by taxpayers, who then reap the rewards. It’s not an accident of geography or artifact of culture that the United States has bred some of the best inventors of the 20th and 21st century. The hidden engine of the country’s illustrious track record has been the grants given to academic researchers by federal agencies that the U.S. DOGE Service has been decimating and that President Donald Trump proposes to shrink catastrophically in the next budget.

Lithium-ion batteries that power your smartphone and computer, weather forecasts that help you figure out what to wear, wings of airplanes that take you on vacation and all the messaging you do online can be traced to the symbiosis between research funded by government and private industry, the scaffolding for mind-melds of scholars and entrepreneurs. Moderna’s multibillion-dollar coronavirus vaccine that saved millions of lives owes its origins to decades of research on mRNA, viruses and vaccines that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Google arose from a National Science Foundation digital libraries grant that supported then-Stanford University graduate student Larry Page. We have QR codes, barcodes and MRIs today because of basic research investments in mathematics and physics.

That U.S. businesses have led the recent revolution in artificial intelligence is owed to the decades of research supported by the U.S. government in computing, neuroscience, autonomous systems, biology and beyond that far precedes those companies’ investments. Virtually the entire U.S. biotech industry — which brought us treatments for diabetes, breast cancer and HIV — has its roots in publicly funded research. Even a small boost to NIH funding has been shown to increase overall patents for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Don’t count on the free market to fix what Trump and DOGE will destroy. Even though U.S. businesses have, over the past two decades, significantly increased the amount they invest in research, their projects tend to have a narrower focus and shorter time horizon than what government funds. That’s fine for building a slightly better gadget, but not the same as funding a wide range of open-ended questions that can, over time, yield big breakthroughs.

Giving out grants for what might look frivolous or wasteful on the surface is a feature, not a bug, of publicly funded research. Consider that Agriculture Department and NIH grants to study chemicals in wild yams led to cortisone and medical steroids becoming widely affordable. Or that knowing more about the fruit fly has aided discoveries related to human aging, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

For obvious reasons, companies don’t tend to invest in shared scientific knowledge that then allows lots of innovation to flourish. That would mean spending money on something that does not reap quick rewards just for that particular company.

Current business trends are more likely to help kill the U.S. innovation engine. A growing share of the country’s research and development is now being carried out by big, old companies, as opposed to start-ups and universities — and, in the process, the U.S. as a whole is spending more on R&D without getting commensurately more economic growth. Companies that already dominate a market — whether that’s searching the internet, selling consumer products online or social networking — are unlikely to create the next breakthrough inventions, Ufuk Akcigit, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has shown. “Young, start-up firms will spend money on the most radical and creative research possible to take down the market leaders,” he told me. But once a firm grows and ages, its incentive is to stay within the lines to protect its existing products and customers, instead of completely remaking a marketplace.

Large corporations, especially in tech, are hiring the country’s talented scientists and engineers, offering them handsome salaries they can’t get in academia or when starting their own businesses. And when would-be inventors go to leading companies, they are on average less inventive than they would be if they had joined start-ups or remained at universities that spin off their inventions — with fewer patents to show for it.

So why would anyone who benefits from America’s innovation engine — in Congress, in the American public — let the Trump administration break it? The glitch is the delay. Most people can’t yet see what’s being lost. The most profitable companies in the country continue to trade on investments in research made decades ago, while political leaders strip the next generation of the chance to become groundbreaking inventors and innovators. Preventing such entrepreneurs from rising might even protect the big companies’ profits. Little wonder, then, that many of the richest men in the world — men who call themselves innovators — have done little to protect the invention engine from Trump’s havoc. Or that the richest of them, Elon Musk, has even been an architect of its destruction. Meanwhile, Musk keeps boosting his own companies with public funds, proving that at least his private-sector innovation depends on the government he is stripping for parts.

Breaking things, as one innovation mantra goes, doesn’t have to be bad — but only if there is a vision to replace what is destroyed. No leader slashing the government’s science budgets has proposed a replacement model for the engine that has powered U.S. economic growth and earned the admiration of the world. No democratic country has been more inventive than the United States. Rather, in the late 20th century, as the United States invested in knowledge, countries from Brazil to the former Soviet Union invested in roads and buildings — in infrastructure people could see right before their eyes. Those countries’ growth stagnated while America’s thrived, as U.S. investment built great universities and colleges that became magnets for the world’s brightest minds to build their lives, make their discoveries and start companies in the United States.

There is no plainer betrayal of the MAGA promise to restore the nation’s storied past than to destroy this legacy of invention. What we’re losing is far more important, however, than the pride one felt being part of that America. We’re losing the country’s future.­