Well I can tell you what happend in why NASA is in such a sorry state..
1. Democrats
2. Richard Nixon
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Welfare bums
5. Carl Sagan (He did not want humans to go into space)
6. Bill Clinton
Gerald Ford was not in too long for much of an effect on NASA
Ronald Reagan tried to revive it but did not have the votes
Bush I tried to revive it but it was mostly lip service
GW, he may have the votes. More than lip service needs to withdrawl from the UN Space Treaty...
actually, I blame JFK and his moonshot idiocy for taking NASA from a diverse R&D agency with a rational 30 year timetable for incremental expansion of capabilities and long-term space-presence/exploitation and turning it into a bureaucratically top-heavy behemoth with narrow and unrelated single-project agendas and circumscribed by political pork.