Given that the article we're discussing explicitly mentions the NSF contribution to those projects and links to articles going into great depth about the details, including NSFNET, I'm going to assume you're working off prior assumptions.
Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.