I normally think of our economic decline as part of a larger issue with humans extracting millions of years of fossil fuels in a cosmic second and global neoliberalism's insane way of dealing with that. I tend not to think particular individuals/elections would have made that much of a difference. But had Al Gore assumed the Presidency he legally won, it's hard to imagine we'd be in such a crazy position today. At least there might have been more infrastructure in place to help people cope and mitigate the worst of the inevitable, and that would have included continued funding for higher ed.
In other words, I don't think you were wrong or short sighted when you believed in that STEM PhD. The illegal or unconstitutional behavior of a lot of bad actors have made it a lot worse than it would have otherwise been.
Re grants, a research development strategy I used to recommend to many tenure-stream clients is to get built into a lot of interdisciplinary education (NSF EHR, usually) grant proposals, although I suspect those will be cut more too (they're facing 1-3% rates and it gets crazier each year). However, education faculty usually desperately need STEM faculty as Co-PI's for credibility with reviewers, so it's a good way to pick up a summer month and you need to be on several proposals for one to hit. If he's on a research appt, that'd be tougher. Of course, if he's tenured, there's always the admin route, or going out on the market (there are a lot of privates picking up faculty from seriously underfunded state institutions).
Google journal editing and look for the company headquartered here in RTP (Durham zip, I think). They love guys like him and if he's not having to publish beyond what he cares about (meaning, he's not angling for RPT), then he could pick up a lot of bedtime editing work to knock out those monthly student loan payments.
Good luck!
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