I have zero problem with the NRO's budget or its existence and mission statement, undoubtedly its data products are proving extremely helpful right now in a behind-the-scenes way stopping the Ukrainians from being overrun by the Russian army. In addition to the well publicized equipment (HIMARs, etc) provided by the US and NATO states there is certainly a large amount of data on russian armor movements, ammo dump locations, logistics depot locations etc being funnelled from the US into the Ukrainian military command.
Just because a project or budget is black doesn't necessarily mean it's useless or nefarious.
In addition to the above of course NASA should have a much higher budget. I would like it if they could spend it on things that aren't flying pork barrels like the SLS. If they want to launch huge heavy things to orbit, designing something in two pieces that can attach together and using two fully expendable Falcon Heavy launches right now would be a tiny fraction of the cost. Not even counting the theoretical capability of Starship.
Of course not, it does mean that we don't have the ability to know if it is useless or nefarious or not.
In reality maybe this doesn't work so well.
Snowden showed they desperately need some light to shine on them once in a while.
Otherwise intelligence agencies have a historically consistent tendency to get a little too laissez faire with people's right.
NRO is probably the most secretive of all of them, but I'm assuming looking at pictures of Russian tanks and Chinese missile silos all day isn't the most civil-rights threatening thing vs storing billions of peoples emails, text messages, and phone calls like the NSA.
If the famously secretive[1] NRO can just donate that, imagine how far ahead their newer stuff is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
[1]: founded in 1960, but only officially acknowledged in 1973 and then by accident.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
Trump gave the whole world a good idea how far ahead the newer stuff is when he tweeted an image from an NRO satellite. Estimated at ~10cm/pixel resolution.
Scott Manley published a great break down: https://youtu.be/JRLVFn9z0Gc
It will make you angry. Aside from the mirror fault, there were a number of operational issues that Hubble ran into that the TLAs knew about (e.g., solar panel flapping, radiation around the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly resetting Hubble's computers, etc.) . . . and didn't tell anyone because of secrecy concerns.
I'm pretty sure that SpaceX is being paid for this. They are not a charity but a for-profit company.