Honestly, the fact that NASA and the NPS need budgets, and are subject to the whims and leverage of politicians without a shred of care for what they do, has always seemed insane to me. Sure, these organizations are literally preserving our past (in the case of the NPS) and forging our future (in the case of NASA); they’re some of the biggest and most meaningful things we reach for as a society, but they still have to serve at the whims of this idiocracy that took over after they were set up, and deal with a “looming budget shutdown” every fall.

It’s like if the warp core on the Starship Enterprise was powered by two squirrels bickering over the same nut. There’s just such a mismatch between the goals of the organizations and the people responsible for keeping them funded.