They live and die on the whims of the CIA and military industrial complex. They are a platform for delivering spy satellites that's allowed to do a bit of science as a treat.

The public, for the most part, stopped caring about NASA after the US stopped going to the moon. Most of the rest believe NASA is hiding aliens or controlling the weather or some such nonsense.

From The Planetary Society: "None of NASA's budget is used for national defense or intelligence gathering programs; it is a civilian agency responsible for the peaceful exploration of space"

Do you have evidence to the contrary you could share?

https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget#:~:text=N....

GP is hyperbolic but essentially correct. Generally, states will move as much as science and technology research that is not militarily sensitive to the public sphere - such as NASA. This is because many scientists won't work for the military directly [1], but will work on stuff that has both military and non-military applications.

Many people have also written quite a lot about how the race to the moon was primarily funded because it was a military domination competition. Once the USSR decisively lost, the US stopped doing that expensive science. A good overview of the geopolitics of space exploration and research is the book Dark Skies by Daniel Deudney [2].

[1] Combination of ethical reasons and having to do security checks and your freedoms somewhat restricted.

[2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dark-skies-978019090...

I thought SpaceX took over that role.

Not entirely, I don't think.

Thats exactly why clickbait makes no sense. Who is it targeting? The lay person? They have no say in NASA's budget. If NASA wants funding they have to look at who holds the reigns in congress and give them pork. Thats it. That's their mechanism. When they were extremely well funded around apollo it was because they had pork a la advancing ICBM and surveillance satellite technology. Not because they got billy to tune in between episodes of will rogers.