I would say that most university researchers are addicted to government grant money. Their ability to achieve tenure is, to a large extent, determined by their ability to attract grant money. Universities like grant money. The problem arrives when the grant issuers have a political agenda which is advanced by certain results, and harmed by other results, and they focus their money on people who tell them what they want to hear.
We saw this kind of thing in Global Warming, where the existence of Global Warming justified lucrative scams like carbon credit trading, gave more power to the EPA, and more power to legislators who could convince the EPA to back off from constituents who paid enough campaign money.
By a Darwinian process, the scientists who were left, were the ones who were good at giving the grant issuers the results they wanted to see.
Yeah, the AGW grant circus got completely ridiculous. It didn’t matter if you had a topic outside the realms of physics, climate, chemistry or even biology, anything was fair game. You could be an assistant prof of sociology fishing for a grant and if you mentioned AGW, you had a much easier time of tapping the money tree.