It's much more than "talk": the end of the Cold War (plus perhaps other things and I would expect the dot.com crash didn't help) resulted in MIT receiving a lot less money and way prior to the Great Recession it's been in what seems to be a nearly eternal retrenchment mode, with frequent administrative downsizing and layoffs (something that was previously unheard of, at least in the post-WWII period). I can remember when they changed the cleaning of most bathrooms from every day to "frequent cleaning" (they said every other day at the time).

Then "At night, the ice weasels come", or the Great Recession wacked a good part of their endowment like most ever other institution like MIT. They didn't get caught out like Harvard but it's caused a lot of problems, e.g. last time I checked freezing the conversion of the old graduate student dorm into a refurbished undergraduate dorm.