If only Columbia was a private university with a 15 billion dollar endowment, then they wouldn't need the government's permission to poke at some plastic.
This is a ridiculous bad faith talking point. That's not how endowments work, nor would it be possible for universities to spend them down for very long. Scientific research is an engine of innovation in the US, and it's penny wise pound foolish to attempt to save money by cutting of NIH and NSF dollars.
Private universities can, in fact, fund their own researchers.
No - these universities do not have the funds required to sustainably conduct research at the scale that it currently does.
They absolutely do have the funds required to sustain research. If they're spending their own money instead of the government's, then maybe they would have to be a bit selective and cut out the crap, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway.
That's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.
Why is this getting downvoted ? Past grants for this type of research at URI, for example, are in the $4M - $8M /yr range.