Cutting these programs is a drop in the bucket financially, and will have two big effects. First, we can't just keep sending up the shuttle until they all fail. We will just start using the Russians for access to space. This is a horrible national security move. And the biggest effect will be to eliminate very technical, very hard to replace knowledge carried by knowledgable employee's brains. By the time we want to return to these programs again, the people will have moved on to something else.
This is all coming just as we are starting to have valid economis reasons for returning to the moon, such as mining Helium-3.
That point is key. We want the smart guys (and gals) to have an outlet for their talents in THIS COUNTRY. We’ve already been outsourcing labor and manufacturing.. it’d be suicide to do that with the technical workers.