-If the social/financial costs of verifying string theory exceed the benefits -to be gained to societies, then screw the physicists. The money is better -spent studying human health, argicultural ecosystems, forest blights, -atmospheric chemistry..the list goes on and on.
With string theory, the energy needs or so high that it's not even conceivable at the moment to do the experiments required, although I am sure there are lower level experiments to soak up the funds.
The problem with looking at science funding as a zero-sum game is that I'm not sure it's always true that more funding for one area cuts off funding for another. Sometimes it does but other times, a "big science" project creates a funding umbrella that other cheaper projects can slip under. When the main projects costs billions, what's another million more here or there.
Science funding is such a small part of the national budget that it's really hard to treat any particular part as being about competition with other parts. Within the science bureucracies, that's sometimes true, but less important when dealing with Congressionally-mandated line items in the budget.
-- Nathan