I don't think government funding battery research makes as much sense now as it used to. Absolutely everything runs on batteries nowadays, to the point where they are the main source of expense and weight for a large swathe of consumer goods. The commercial incentive to build a better battery is just huge. I remember reading some years ago that the prospectus of a large oil company, ExxonMobil maybe, explicitly singled out a sudden leap in battery energy density as something that could torpedo their $250b/yr business. It's hard to see how the government finds a way to build something that the private sector can't, when there's a trillion dollars at stake.