they bleed money to 'contractors', many of them parasitic who are actually based overseas.
They develop 'open source' solutions which they hand over to private people to profiteer on.
The developed networking and digital wireless, enabling monopolists to censor the whole wide world through gatekeeping.
. . . they let incompetent legacy assholes get doctorial degrees for free because it's better to keep them out of the offices and laboratories and off projects, so they keep going back to college on a full-boat scholarship.
other stuff too.
but even with all that most of them are rather awesome.