See, I'm not sure I buy into that last paragraph. I don't think they'd risk their reputation on it by cynically sucking off the white house. Though, I think they're causing quite a bit of damage to their reputation by using what seem to be ill-suited models. Ones that don't really make sense when trying to predict epidemics. It would be like developing a model for a nation and then using it to model state-wide outbreaks. It just doesn't work that way. If you can wade through the derpy Federalist posts, others comments on the pre-print of their model are questioning their methodology.
Link
And maybe it's not so much saying their model is bad, but people are using the model to make decisions on question it was never intended to answer. The model really needs to stop trying to be an omniscient oracle for all questions and start asking it to perform more simplified analyses asking just one or two questions. Not trying to predict everything across the world and answer all questions about infection speed, resource scarcity, can we restart the economy, does social distancing work, etc.
It's almost guaranteed their model was originally designed to answer one question but it's been frankensteined into something it wasn't intended for and now we're asking it to predict things that are based on extraordinarily complex variables. Does the model take into account terminal stupidity and the mobility of said stupidity? Probably not. Michigan's model can probably just be set on fire for the next two weeks.
Anyways, we're learning a lot about pandemic modeling this month and unfortunately it's mostly paid for by people dying.