The DSN has facilities located around the globe which is most definitely not in Congressional districts, so it's not capable of being a jobs program. That might help explain why it gets such little attention.

Call your Congressperson. Ask them to support an appropriation specifically for Nasa's DSN. It only takes 5-10 minutes.

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Sending a letter is probably more efficient and effective than making a phone call. But bear in mind that many sensible proposals are DOA if they don't fit neatly into the hyperpartisan agenda that obtains in Congress at present. Some lawmakers would be against any sort of proposal that involves increasing spending, and when one party has a razor thin majority such ideologues have leverage disproportionate to their numbers.

For sure, but it only takes a few minutes to make the call versus asking folks here to write a letter. Default to action and all that jazz. A call is better than nothing.

Hi, 1999 called. Today, people are more along the lines of "What's a call?"

The old rule was congress critters weighted a personal letter with highest weight over a form letter, over a call, over an email. Now, staffers are of younger age, and they are the gate keepers of what gets passed along. So that order of weighting may be different now. Then again, that's probably also highly dependent on the specific congress critter. AOC may be much more open to tweets/emails/etc vs Mitch McConnell or similar aged someone

A representative from the EFF's policy team I met at def con a few weeks back mentioned that calls are still weighted heavily. YMMV.

Writing and printing a letter takes about 5 minutes, phone calls are not that time effective unless you already know the person you're calling, in my experience. Calling Congress I would expect to be on hold for a long time, plus staffers know that you're reading a script, and will also discount it because you have a general ask rather than saying 'Please vote (yes/no) on HR ####'.

I agree, but perhaps they should've included in the Artemis budget a small item for comms investment/modernization. Or even better spread out the DSN cost in all missions (JWST, Orion...) and also ask partners like ESA and JAXA to help cover the costs.

I fear that as soon as something becomes this controlled by politics, reasonable project decisions take the backseat to political concerns, no matter what any participant's motivations and reasoning is.

They might have tried attaching this to Artemis, as you suggest, but gotten political pushback. They might have known that they can get Artemis approved without the DSN improvement and then hold Artemis hostage for DSN improvements. DSN money might have ended in the wrong Congress person's district. So many possible political reasons we might never know