OK, so a fellowship is the government pays you to learn. I didn't know about that system before but it sounds like financial aid with a fancy title. Furthermore, it's not science - the field is education. These fellows weren't part of a pipeline of experts. America isn't in danger of running out of the education part of developing experts, it has no shortage of degreed people.
I'm not sure experts in education are really doing anything important. Even when they do discover effective ways of educating students, they're rarely implemented. It's getting further from the core issue. If you go even further still, you could say we need to fund, say, car salesmen, because they're enabling experts to drive to work or some other very indirect benefit. Sure car salesmen are useful but, like education researchers, only a tiny portion of their work goes towards creating top scientists.
