Fear mongering is the most common political tool to get funding for any governmental project.  

Any military defense project, the Cold War "Race to the Moon", Ebola, AIDS; pick your threat, demand your money to meet the threat.

Even politicians or scientists fighting real threats have used that same tool to their advantage.

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

H.L. Mencken

In Defense of Women (1918)