Show me the money

The AAPA Pollitzer award essay prompt for 2013 asked graduate students to come up with a 4 minute elevator speech for President Obama and congressional leaders about why physical anthropology deserves more federal funding. It got me thinking a lot about federal versus private grant funds in biological anthropology and science in general. Why is there such a focus on funding fields that are already of interest for the private sector (medicine, chemistry, etc)? I know the medical research field is even more dependent on grant funds than we are (often including for their own salaries) and this blog entry from Kate Clancy really drove it home:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2013/01/27/short-grant-rant-on-broken-promises/
And now with the fight in large public research universities to defend their research agendas to state legislatures which are more focused on the "bottom line", I have to wonder what my job search next year is going to look like. I guess grant money doesn't matter that much if you can't find a professorship or post-doc or he only job you can find has such high teaching demands (i.e., efficiency according to the Texas Public Policy think tank) that you won't be doing any research anyways.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/t/story/texas-fight-highlights-higher-ed-culture-clash-18389175?ref=http%3A%2F%2F