Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"
NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal".
The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.
> lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal
I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.
A big part of the reason for useless Gateway was that NASA wanted post-ISS missions, but was too afraid to roll with a permanent Moon base instead. The other big part was that Orion sucked, and somehow, neither "get Orion to suck less" nor "roll with Orion, provision for HLS to do more" was in the cards. This only changed under Isaacman.
For every Curiosity and JWST, there's ARM and Artemis. It seems like it's getting better now, but very slowly.