Or, perhaps: They enable grants.

I've only ever helped write a single grant application. My parts of that had to be rewritten with more use of passive verbs and general neutral-sounding but largely vacuous prose.

I thought it's like those chick jokes. You don't offer comments about random women's gorgeous breasts because you really want to, it's just expected in some contexts. It tells the audience you're one of the guys. Overlong sentences where all that's done is passively done inform the grant reviewers that the author a proper scientist who should be enabled to continue with valuable research.