There's a bigger problem here that she doesn't touch on that surrounds these people though. If they don't get work and the field shrinks, then it will mostly cease to exist.

SOME of this research is actually useful, and restricting funding overall will just kill the entire research community. Instead, we should have people who know better approving the funding so that it is applied to things the planet needs: clean energy, understanding and combating climate change, new materials or fuels for space exploration...etc.

R&D on any scale is speculative to begin, but I do agree there are a large number of people in this community exploiting that fact to get grant money.