This seems very plausible to me, but they need to verbalize this and make a convincing case that there are people they could hire that would do good work on existential risk reduction. What would a good answer look like? "The visiting fellows program has been quite successful. Visiting fellows (who were not hired) have come up with ideas X,Y,Z and accomplished a, b, c and there are people who we would like to employ but we cannot because we don't have the funding to do so."