Yeah, my plan was always to get a full professor position at a mid-tier university. Had I known the NIH budget would have been frozen, I would have not gone to grad school and instead worked for Yahoo pre-IPO, and today I'd be a many-times-over millionaire funding a new crop of scientists out of my money.
2. Suppose you don't care about providing steady scientific employment for individual scientists but do value scientific progress (I find this position contradictory to the point of absurdity, but let's roll with it). Even in this case, cyclical funding cuts are still a source of waste:
a) society essentially wasted money subsidizing the education of people who are now not using their training (some might be, but probably many aren't).
b) funding freezes are often temporary, but by the time spending rebounds all those scientists you spent billions of dollars training have moved on to indsutry (research or no). So now you have to double down and train a new generation in order to make progress.