I worked as a contractor on a NASA project for a couple of years. Your observation that the purpose of NASA is to consume funds, accrue influence, and generally perpetuate itself matches with many of my experiences of those years. This is what comes to my mind:

I saw sounding rocket missions with overall costs of several million dollars completely lost, in terms of science data, because the telemetry link was lost. Well, we were launching recoverable vehicles and overall data recording needs were just a few Gigabytes over a 15 minute mission, so why not just record that data on-board in case the telemetry link to the ground failed? Oh, I was told, doing that is far too expensive. Well, the cost of a recorder is not even close to the cost of launching a whole research rocket with payload, so the whole thing just struck me as a tremendous waste.

My immediate previous job was as an engineer for the US Navy. I was well familiar with the concept of "colors of money", so I get that sometimes you may be flush with cash for some things (staff, facilities) but devoid of cash for things like equipment purchases. But even in my Navy years I saw obvious stupidities like this eliminated with some financial management. The contractor and NASA management didn't care. They were fine with losing years of time and millions of dollars for want of a $10,000 crash survivable solid state recorder.

The contractor has since merged with a larger competitor, then merged again. That same entity and largely the same people remain in place, managing (and in my opinion, mis-managing) this program. The only people who really seemed to "lose" when mission data was lost, as far as I could tell, were the graduate students working for our Principal Investigators who lost the data they were depending on for their PhD theses...

it's also a high quality job creation program that employs 17K at NASA and who knows how many at contractors

it's also a military capability

it's also saved who knows how many lives with weather satellites and ambulance GPS and satphone rescues

it's also a meteor warning program

it's also a global warming monitoring program

it also begets companies like spacex and capabilities like GPS for all and inspires people to pursue science

sure there's fat, but we're employing highly skilled domestic tech and science people with that fat, would it be better if we left all those tax dollars to be spent on iphones and Starbucks? or the prison industrial complex? NASA and NOAA and the NIH and any pure science agency is super defensible

We can spend all the taxpayer money on creating 17k highly skilled jobs that actually do something.

NASA does some useful stuff, but we could be doing much more useful stuff with the same money, while still having 17k+ jobs and good military technology and weather satellites etc.

Can we though? Or have we demonstrated over time that any suitably large program sustained over a suitably long time will innevitably need to account for the enormous incentive there is to exploit that funding. What do you propoes to do? Ask the defence companies if they would stop exploiting the government contracts that only exist because of their lobbying in the first place?

It's so tiring that people are unwilling or unable to handle nuance and complexity. An organization can both be bloated and inefficient as well as bold and daring and on the cutting edge of science.

I'll take a bloated NASA that sends probes to Pluto and funds new exciting programs such as Commercial Crew over no space program any day.

If you'd like to provide a specific plan for effective reform, I'd be interested in that as well.

It's not that it's bloated and inefficient, it's that the basic mechanisms driving its behavior are not aligned with its ostensible stated purpose.

A politician doesn't usually care about science. He cares about votes and influence. So when he gives money to NASA he is doing so to produce those, not to produce science. If science gets done it's almost accidental.

The reason politicians get away with this is that the public lets them. They accept that what NASA is doing is ok, even when it's not. Apologists like yourself are ultimately to blame.

The way I understand it is that during the space shuttle years, companies made ties and lots of money off of federal contracts. The whole SLS program has since been doninated by those companies using political pressure to get those contracts back on new missions.

The SLS design was required by congress to maximize use of Shuttle hardware and contractors.