What I gather from the article, if "a few million" means $3 million, is that we've been paying 60 people $50,000 apiece for a few weeks of meetings each summer.

What I gather from the article, if "a few million" means $3 million, is that we've been paying 60 people $50,000 apiece for a few weeks of meetings each summer. Without knowing the value of the output of those meetings - only that they've lost the funding - "that's a lot of money" is a reasonable default position whether there are even worse ways to spend it or not.