Ok, Accepting that flyingsquid's remark and mine will be moderated into Negativeland, I will feed his/her troll-ness just this once.
Budgets running "over": I agree that you have, using perfect 20/20 hindsight, identified a worrisome trend: rising NASA project costs over time. I will argue against this as a legitimate complaint on 2 fronts:
A) All government projects rise, at rates at least equal to NASAs. By the time the projects "end" they all appear wildly delayed, and hugely inflated. B1, B2, F22, F35, LCS, Stryker, M2 Bradley, M1 Abrams, F18 (which was the loser in the competition for the F16), NexRad, IRS software upgrades, the list is endless. You've chosen to reframe NASA's behavior as out-of-place, when creeping budgets and timelines are the norm. These "creeps" are in fact reviews, where congress revisits the project's justification and reconsiders continuance or abandonment.
B) Hindsight is unavoidable, but somewhat useless. All government projects are engaged in for the best reasons at the time. (Including pork: politics and perception are both, unhappily, reasons.) All of them are initially put up with gigantic dark-areas of knowledge. The proponents of the project have to name the best number they can with the available knowledge, then run with it. Each successive increase is a far harder battle than the initial start, and the fact that a project eventually flies means that the best congressional minds decided it was worth it at each of those increases.
My conclusion: You are offended by a pattern of behavior that is visible looking back, but invisible looking forward. I welcome your proposal to eliminate this problem, but to tote out the tried-and-true phrases like "accountability for failures" and "leadership is failing them" is to cloth Luddism in conservative gowns. I've attempted to make the case that while the system isn't elegant, it is your perception of it that is your problem. This inelegant system produces investments that it believes are worthy, using the best information available at the time, at each step along the way. That it follows a Drunkard's Walk is meaningless if it gets to the desired goal.