My experience has been that guvmint employees jealously guard their prerogative to fund what THEY want. I suspect Bussard lobbied some pols and got pressure applied to civil servants. When something like this happens I apply the Occam’s Razor Principle of Government, i.e., if stupidity and incompetence explain the results, that is the most likely explanation.
Again, it’s not WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know; right?