The funding on mathematics is already one of the lowest accross science [0, 1], and theoretical math funding is probably much smaller than the applied math one already, so that's not even close to how much funding theoretical math gets.

So, we are talking about a field that already does not use that much funding anyway, and most high end theoretical mathematicians probably would make much more money in the industry anyway, so this seems like missing the forest for the tree imo.

[0] Table in page 1 in https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/71_fy2025.pdf?Versio...

[1] Figure DISC-13 in https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20257/academic-r-d

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.