UCLA has a $10B endowment. I find it bollocks that they and these other academic institutions can't just dip into that for their researchers to (hopefully) ride out the current funding situation at a minimum.
The vast majority of people talking about how big university endowments are don't care what the rules are on it. It's not that people don't know how endowments work; they just find the rules to be bullshit to justify universities continuing the status quo.