It's not just the funding but the jobs themselves. Universities and even the funding bodies want to show shiny easy-to-digest numbers to their stakeholders to justify tuition and government funds. Which means these institutions in turn expect those numbers from their researchers, who then are happy to comply and build their paper mills and citation cartels, solving no real problems at best and producing fake data at worst.
The timing of this announcement is strange. Maybe this was already planned for late October, or maybe this is an attempt to take control of the narrative after all the horrible publicity.