Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't.
Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.
This might not count as it's not a single 'official scientific experiment or tool', but I think that biosci is clearly getting heavily funded.
Big Science and Big Politics in the United States: Reflections on the Death of the SSC and the Life of the Human Genome Project (1997) is a classic in history of science analyzing this competition.
Research into virology seems a bigger thing to research. There is way more "parallelism" there meaning funding could be allocated more efficiently nin some given time frame.