Idiom for the effect that money from funding is easier to spend, as opposed to one's own savings

Solution 1:

Skin in the game

From Wikipedia:

To have "skin in the game" is to have incurred monetary risk by being invested in achieving a goal.

The problem with the lab leaders is that they don't have any skin in the game.

Solution 2:

Any allusion to "Other People's Money" or OPM will have this sense. The phrase has been in use since the 18th century to designate, variously, the moral obliquity of inherited wealth, the readiness of politicians to spend taxpayer wealth, and the desire of manufacturers to drive up prices by tariffs. Its most usual modern sense, leveraging investments with borrowed or deposited money and thus shuffling investment risk off on others while retaining investment gains, seems to date to 1914, when progressivist attorney Louis Brandeis (later a justice of the Supreme Court) collected his series of Harper's Weekly articles on the banking industry under the title Other People's Money / and How the Bankers Use It.

Solution 3:

The company’s dime is a phrase I’ve heard a lot here in the US.

Solution 4:

One idiom that I have heard used in this sense is playing with the house's money, which I believe refers to having won enough money at a casino that the player is now risking the profits from his previous winnings rather than the money he or she brought to the table in the first place.

Investopedia has this discussion of the "house money effect":

Definition of 'House Money Effect'

The tendency for investors to take more and greater risks when investing with profits. The house money effect gets its name from the casino phrase "playing with the house's money." The house money effect was first described by Richard H. Thaler and Eric J. Johnson of the Johnson Graduate School of Management of Cornell University.