As far as I can work out about this USA, this is not true. It is certainly not true where I am from. It may be true in the case of postdoctoral researchers (but not always), i.e. relatively junior researchers who don’t yet have a permanent position. But a permanent position is just that - it’s like a permanent job, and you’re paid a salary by the university that gave you that position. You will typically also need to apply for grants in order to pay for things like:
- travel to conferences
- travel to collaborate in person with colleagues at other institutions
- make papers open access
- hire postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.
I did two postdocs during my time in academia and both were grant funded (one awarded to me, one awarded to a more senior researcher who then took me on as a postdoc). I also applied to one postdoc position I remember which although fixed term, not permanent, was paid for by the university. I worked with many permanent staff who had salaries from the university as well as grants for other things.
As far as I can tell in the USA the only real difference is that your salary may only be for the 9 teaching months, not the full academic year, and you’re expected to top up those 3 months if you want to be paid a proper wage.
In my (old) field, this was not really true, but maybe it’s true in some other fields.
But it is true that if all these grants are cut, it will have a big effect on research output due to killing off early career researchers. It’s clear that the US Government doesn’t give a shit that it’s going to ruin the country’s research credentials.