Phrased another way: Congress elected to raise the costs on all Americans who drive cars or use electricity in favor of reallocating industrial inputs required

Phrased another way: Congress elected to raise the costs on all Americans who drive cars or use electricity in favor of reallocating industrial inputs required to satisfy their desires to a project which doesn't support a space exploration program we don't have. I lose geek cred every time I say it, but NASA is not a science agency which occasionally funnels objectionably high amounts of money to politically favored firms. NASA is a funding mechanism for politically favored firms which occasionally produces industrial biproducts which bear some loose relation to research. If space exploration wasn't an applause light among geeks because of science fiction, we'd have a strong consensus to defund the entire agency.