Let's funnel more money into a system that's suffering from Eroom's Law?

I didn't say more money, I said more science. Wouldn't it be great if all patients taking a particular drug would have direct access to a scientifically-trained researcher/assistant that could interpret the effect on that patient, and publish their results as a single data point on that drug? For many conditions, there are patient support groups. I would want these groups to participate in the evaluation of drug effectiveness, but most lack scientific rigour and have little means to corroborate with other groups or manufacturers.

We'll keep 1% - 10% of them and give them an order of magnitude more funding.

I think this will not prevent agenda-driven research (AKA corruption of science). At the most, you will get higher inflation of the cost of buying specific results with money. And since you've reduced the total scientific capacity, there is even less capacity for verification of results.

Also we'll close down some branches of science entirely because they're a waste of effort.

I'm afraid the first that would be closed down are the purely theoretical sciences, such as advanced math and string theory. After all, they don't have a practical use, don't they? And wouldn't it be useful if you could classify the entire field of climate research as "waste of effort", because you happen to be in power and don't like its results?

The problem is that we don't have a universal, uncontested definition of "waste of effort". Serendipitous discoveries are a real thing, and have spawned entirely new areas of research or tools. Some of the major accidental breakthroughs: penicillin, microwave ovens, teflon, vulcanization of rubber, viagra.

We will never know what breakthrough we missed out on by not pursuing some research. I think narrowing the scope of research is a bad idea.

Maybe science has a scaling problem [..] maybe nobody is reading the journals [..] because it's like drinking from a fire hose

Science has an accessibility problem. When researchers have to pay thousands of dollars before they can even read other studies, that automatically sets a minimum bar for their own scientific research to break even. Since replication studies can not lead to new patent applications, they're only money sinks.

And you are correct that there are too many publications adding next to nothing to the overall knowledge. But that too, in my eyes, is a problem of accessibility. Not money-wise, but content-wise. We really need better search and classification systems. But as long as the content is locked up, the content holders have no incentive to improve our access.

Not being able to integrate existing knowledge is a failure mode

Fully agreed.

You've seen 2001, so you've seen what my parents generation expected to happen by the early 21st century.

Not sure what you mean here. If you mean "2001: A Space Odyssey", then no, I haven't seen it. I have seen "Airplane 2" though...

If our advancements are actually impressive we don't need the journalists to prompt us into thinking so.

But that was exactly my point. The lunar landing wasn't actually that impressive, yet we had thousands of journalists prompting us to think so. The space race was overhyped because it was used as propaganda on the cold war front. Yes, it was a major milestone in human engineering, but as a scientific achievement it was just incremental.

To me, it is exactly because of journalist hype that we think that the lunar landing was a greater accomplishment than the Mars exploration missions, or than the permanently-inhabited International Space Station.

that probe that landed on that asteroid recently went dark for most of it's life because they used solar power instead of the nuclear battery that powers the Voyagers.

Yes, the aversion against nuclear energy is a great tragedy for modern life, especially for space exploration. But that is a political problem brought on by the weaponization of nuclear power, it's not a scientific or engineering problem.

This is a world wide stagnation in science/engineering/technology ex-computation

I think we'll just have to disagree on that.