LBJ was the last Democratic president who cared much for the US space program. That was during the Cold War, and he once said he didn’t want to go to bed under the light of a communist moon. The Democrats we have had in the White House since then all seemed to think NASA is a waste of money.
If we continue on our current course a Chinese moon is a certainty.
Waste of money, no, pork barrel, yes, anything to grab and hold power. Shelby jumped parties to keep that going for himself.
That’s why we’ve had decades of the go-nowhere ISS, and why the overpriced and dangerous STS continued for such a long while. The unmanned probes exploring the planets and the orbiting observatories have been a relative bargain.