I share your despair, but I fear the issue is not one of money. You could give NASA ten times as much money and none of it would get into space; their main function is to distribute taxpayers' money to congressional districts, and has been for years.
I met Jeff Hanley when he came to Singapore and listened to his pitch - at about 8th grade level, it seemed. Afterwards I tried to ask him a few questions and he came across as a complete idiot.
Well, NASA propose to build a new heavy-lift vehicle called Ares-V. It is supposed (ha ha) to fly in 2018, and will have the same lift capacity as the Russian Energiya/Vulcan design which was tested in 1988. How's that for progress? NASA then plans to return to the Moon in (I quote their own website) "the 2020 timeframe".
For the record, 1.6 Saturn-V rockets (remember them?) could lift as much as one Ares-V, and could do so next year at about one-twentieth of the cost. So again, it's not about money.
[Saturn-V, 118 tonnes to LEO; Ares-V, 188 tonnes]
But I agree with a previous poster - build the realOrion.