I doubt it. If grant money had been involved, they would have hired a bunch of grad students and done it in 20 years.
It sounds more like a labor of real scholarship. It was started long before the era of multitudinous government grants. Before Franklin Roosevelt.
This project was started during the same year that Ray Chapman Andrews (the inspiration for Indiana Jones) was planning his expeditions into the Gobi desert in Mongolia. It was a golden age, after WWI and before the Great Depression. Calvin Coolidge, one of our greatest and most successful presidents, was in charge during most of this era.
Did a little googling...lotsa past grants and ongoing grants for this.