It's a shame Northrop and Boeing don't have resources to pay for their own R&D.

I've never seen less need for the US govt to step in and fund research. This is the next generation of planes for two established companies in a mature industry. So first these companies get 'paid' by NASA for the R&D, then they'll get paid to build and test prototypes, and things will cycle like that until a new plane design proves out and Northrop and/or Boeing own it, build it, and privatize the profits.

Yeah, and willingly gave his workers health benefits so he could sell more ambulances...

Oh, right, he did none of those things. You were born to a 40 hour work week because generations of workers fought for it. They fought for Sunday off, they fought for the 10-hour workday, and they fought for the 40 hour work week. Thank the workers who organized and fought in unions and gained this victory. Celebrate it and remember the struggle on May Day.

The Bush administration has run a very secretive government--pulling public info off websites, classifying embarrassing info, refusing and stalling in response to requests. So I view this not as back room engineering changes, but as a plan to control the information the federal agencies release to the public, with the goals of restricting and filtering out many things now public.
If you look at it this way, many of the drawbacks of the plan (if the goal was to provide info to the public) become features.