By this logic, the ancient Egyptian pharaohs should have dedicated a sizeable portion of their treasury to researching manned flight, since they knew it was possible and they knew it would have significant economic and military advantages.
Which is to say, just because something is possible in theory doesn't mean we have a clear idea how to get there, and if we're waiting on research breakthroughs, more money is unlikely to significantly speed up the process.
The US is spending around 1% of its national budget on science, and a minuscule part of that goes to quantum computing. That fraction of the pharaoh's treasury might have payed for one rather entertaining crackpot to build bird-like things, but it wouldn't put a dent in their other accomplishments.
But actually if you spend more money than can reasonably and effectively be spent on a given field, you run the risk of setting back the field by advancing charlatans.
VC investment in crypto. The 1% (too generous?) of proposed usecases where crypto can actually solve practical problemsgot hardly any VC funding compared to the idiotic ideas like smart contracts.
If you're talking about Langley, they money was tragically wasted as the local bicycle mechanics achieved the result mostly by ignoring the theories that turned out to be wrong, and are still wrong, and have been proven to be wrong, and yet are still universally taught today, perhaps as a sort of right of passage, because the truth is either too complex or too simple to fit neatly into the understandability exclusion zone.
Which is to say, just because something is possible in theory doesn't mean we have a clear idea how to get there, and if we're waiting on research breakthroughs, more money is unlikely to significantly speed up the process.