Early US (NASA) interplanetary space exploration fell into several specific programs. The first was the Mariner program, which sent out several probes on flyby mission of the inner planets in the 1960s through the 1970s. The first two Mariner missions were destined for Venus, though Mariner 1 experienced a launch failure. In 1962 and 1967 two different flyby missions (Mariner 2 and 5) managed to make close approaches to Venus, but neither entered orbit.

The culmination of the Mariner program was an ambitious series of flybys of the outer planets with the dual spacecraft Mariner Jupiter-Saturn mission, renamed to Voyager prior to launch.

Overlapping somewhat with Mariner was the second series of the Pioneer program (the first being a series of unsuccessful lunar probes from 1958 to 1960). These included a series of "space weather" satellites (Pioneer 6-9) and two outer solar system flybys in the early '70s (Pioneer 10 & 11, both of which passed by Jupiter with Pioneer 11 also passing by Saturn.) This also included two separate missions to Venus, Pioneer 12 and 13, otherwise known as the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Pioneer Venus Multiprobe.

Both Pioneer Venus missions were launched in 1978 and arrived at Venus in December of that same year. The orbiter remained around Venus until 1992. The multiprobe mission sent 4 separate atmospheric probes into the Venusian atmosphere, one large probe and three smaller ones, the smaller ones distributed to interesting locations (one at high Northern latitude location, the other two on the day and night sides of the planet at the time of entry). The small day probe did actually end up surviving all the way to the surface of Venus and continued broadcasting for over an hour after landing, though it had no imager.

But by then the Soviets had long since not only landed on Venus but done so multiple times and had managed to send images from the surface with Venera 9 and 10 in 1975. However, long before then it had already been understood that surface conditions on Venus were that of a barren, scorched, high pressure hellscape.

You can read a summary of the state of the understanding of Venus among astronomers on the eve of the first spacecraft flybys of the planet in 1961 from Carl Sagan here: The Planet Venus - Science, New Series, Vol. 133, No. 3456 (Mar. 24, 1961), pp. 849-858 (note: this is a direct pdf download). Even from remote observations it was possible to determine the surface of Venus was very hot (over 600 Kelvin) and at a fairly high pressure, though at the time the best guess was only about 4 atmospheres of pressure compared to the roughly 90 or so of the actual surface conditions.

Also by then the Viking program (a set of dedicated orbiters and landers for Mars) had achieved the first unambiguously successful landings on Mars in 1976 with the Viking 1 and 2 landers.

In any event, in late 1970 when Venera 7 made the first operational touchdown on another planet the space race had already entered a lower gear. The US had already successfully landed two crewed missions on the lunar surface and the fever pitch of the early space race had worn off. By then NASA had begun transitioning from the small, quick missions that had operated in the '60s and '70s to larger missions that required greater planning and development (like Viking and Pioneer Venus). This meant there was no competitive Venusian lander program after Pioneer Venus, America just looked on while the other Venera landers did their thing. And while those probes did return valuable data, it didn't change the story of what had been known about the surface since Venera 7 or even before then.

In the US there was a call for a high resolution radar mapping mission of Venus in the '70s but it was not funded due to budgetary constraints. Finally in the mid 1980s a lower budget radar mapping mission was proposed and eventually funded (becoming known as "Magellan"), launching 1989 and beginning to map the surface of Venus under the cloud cover with high spatial resolution in 1990. It was this mission which provided some of the most ground breaking insights into Venus since the era of the transition of the view of the planet to the "hot windswept hellscape" during the 1950s. Specifically it provided the shocking detail that though Venus lacks plate tectonics it's surface was quite young compared to the age of the solar system, only a few hundred million years old, and more or less the same age everywhere. This led to the conclusion that Venus underwent a "global resurfacing event" roughly 300-600 million years ago followed by a rapid decrease in volcanic activity since then.

So, in short, by 1970 there was no fever pitch urge to try to one up the Soviets with bigger or better Venusian landers. By then the concern was more just scientific return and budgetary constraints. NASA succeeded in getting atmospheric probes to Venus in the late '70s, and eventually succeeded in sending a high resolution radar mapping probe to the planet much later. On the whole these were probably the correct choices in terms of scientific return, though the Venera landers and the handful of images from the surface are nevertheless impressive and historical achievements.