My thoughts exactly. When you start making a list of all the spending to start cutting in the federal govt, NASA is way way down on the list. To even mention it just means the Democrats are not at all serious about cutting spending.
To my knowledge, most programs are of similar relevance to the budget trimming process.
Aside from Social Security, Medicare and Defense, everything else in the budget is thousands upon thousands of $100 million, $10 million, $1.2 billion and similar small agency budgets.
Part of the tedium of actually balancing the budget is that it requires an audit of all of those little programs to find out HOW to cut their budgets in a manner consistent with their mission statements and goals for the next year.
And that's what protects them from budget reform entirely: the difficulty and man-hours involved to accomplish that.
...Which is why we need to start slashing entire programs from the federal budget, rather than micromanaging each line item on the budget.
NASA is one of the largest of the small agency budgets, though. As such, it gets targeted before the feces-as-art programs since those only get a paltry $500,000 budget.