And —the false dimension of the argument — since this defunding is a way of hammering the deep-blue college towns, it was coming no matter what. There's no amount of "apolitical" research that would prevent educational polarization and thus the logic of smashing the New Havens of the world.
Also, the plain fact of the matter is a humanities professor in the field of Fuck Conservatism Studies pays for him or herself via tuition dollars, and is not dependent on the federal government in the way a physics professor is
Conservatives are hurting the physics professors because they want to and because they can, no amount of disavowing self-supporting scholars would change that