I would be careful about labeling stuff “lies.”

What’s that saying? “Make your words sweet, because one day, you may need to eat them.”

Shadow funding has been a thing for over a century, but it’s getting harder to pull off, as time progresses.

My mother used to be in charge of fundraising for a nonprofit, and she had to be very careful about the provenance of funding. She was just doing it for a science center; not research, so she was actively seeking support from corporations, and needed to make sure that there was no hidden “quid pro quo” (sometimes , there was “aboveboard quid pro quo”). Some of the stories she told me about dodgy funding schemes were eyebrow-raising.

A lot of time, there’s no “quid pro quo.” They just want to have additional research out there, to “muddy the water,” in the future, so they may proxy-fund some pretty whacky stuff.

They will also go after individuals; not organizations. Why leave an NPO paper trail, when you can just send the underpaid professor on an all-expenses-paid “fact finding” trip?

People kind of suck, sometimes.