The market works well without government handouts. The private sector is the principal engine of this country's multi-trillion dollar economy, not government handouts. Thus, ATP is unnecessary. Yet drug companies make such investments. If there is a profit to be made, entrepreneurs will act with or without government handouts.
Bureaucrats have no special talent for picking winners and losers.
Federal bureaucrats have no unique abilities, better than those of private investors and entrepreneurs, to pick winning companies and technologies. It is not by virtue of their keen abilities to spot future market needs or their creative talents for inventing new products or services that bureaucrats acquire power to disburse investment funds. It is by virtue of their ability to function well in a rule-bound organization that is insulated from market forces, or their ability to secure a political appointment. If anything, one should suspect that the capacities that make for successful bureaucrats and politicians would make dull, incompetent entrepreneurs. To put it bluntly, if bureaucrats and political appointees did have special abilities to pick winners and losers, they would become entrepreneurs or would work for entrepreneurs, and actually produce the new products for which they claim consumers clamor.