I think a little bit of history is in order. NASA's charter was to "...provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." These are the first words of the legislation that established NASA in October of 1958. NASA has been delivering what NASA has promised since they opened the doors for business -- data on the problems of flight, and other purposes, like data on climate, crops, and the environment. They've had to deal with wildly divergent funding regimes, fluctuations in public opinion, and most recently, an active, directed effort by Republicans to remove science from the public policy sphere. Without NASA's research mission, there would be a far smaller set of commercial opportunities for American businesses in space. Plenty of military ones, but practically no private, commercial ones.
And Apollo? Apollo was a one-off. It should have been handled 100 percent by the military, and never darkened NASA's door. (The only non-active duty Apollo program astronaut was Armstrong, and he was still military, just not on active duty at the time.)
Ditto the STS -- Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, convinced Nixon that US intelligence agencies would need reliable access to space to combat the growing Soviet presence in orbit, so NASA was given the incompatible tasks of trying to do science and having to keep it secret at the same time. The STS was a failure, not a success, and it should be laid at Nixon/Kissinger's feet, not the US government in general, or NASA in particular.
So, no. Don't piss on NASA, or the government that created NASA. Instead, piss on the military-industrial complex that hijacked NASA for sixty years. Ironically, the same president that proposed NASA to the American people also warned against that military-industrial complex. And doubly ironic, the agency that was created simultaneously with NASA to handle the weaponization of technology, the Advanced Research Project Agency, accidentally created the Internet. Go figure.