There's an old joke about funding, goes something like:

"Why you are always demanding more funding? Why can't you be more like the mathematicians, all they need is a desk, some paper, and a pencil, and a garbage can, and they just do fine. Or how about philosophy, for that matter? They don't even need the garbage can"

I mean, obviously with modern computational mathematics, this doesn't hold so simply, but there is this confound about math research also not getting much funding also because much of it isn't that expensive, relatively speaking.