Agreed. There's more important things to spend public money on at the moment (like servicing the $20T in debt). Let private companies, like SpaceX, voluntarily spend R&D on it.
Given the huge investments NASA has made in SpaceX to date, I'm not entirely convinced that the split between public and private money in this space is as black and white as you suggest.
SpaceX arguably wouldn't be here today without NASA's cash.
NASA paid $1.6b and got 12 flights to the ISS for it. Rather cheap in my book.
I'm not aware of any other "huge investments" ... there were some smaller ones, however.
A not insignificant amount of SpaceX's funding (especially considering the critical time of that funding) is from NASA. They are also leveraging decades of NASA research in their engine and rocket design.
I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, and think they (and other like them) represent the future, but they have a little ways to go before they are completely financing their own R&D (at the moment they're still spending a lot of public dollars).
Considering how little impact they've had recently with a $19 billion dollar annual budget, maybe what we're seeing is an administrative or leadership problem. It would suck for those involved if NASA got severe cuts, but in the long run the geniuses there would find jobs in the private sector like SpaceX and they could make a real difference.
SpaceX arguably wouldn't be here today without NASA's cash.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-w...