[harshpotatoes]

You're thinking about this too pessimistically. In this situation canceling LISA was unfortunately the appropriate response. 1) James Webb is currently costing 12 times the expected construction costs.

2)The astronomy community unfortunately can't pay for LISA, JWST, and all of the other smaller projects at the same time. The other solution, as opposed to keeping lisa, would be to cancel the small stuff. But, I think it is more appropriate to go after this large cost item first before the smaller items.

3)You're forgetting that science isn't just composed of these huge projects, there are still tons of smaller projects that have money poured into them. Radio astronomy still receives money and builds nice telescopes (I think the MWA is the most recent). And let's not forget that for Gravitational Waves, LIGO is still being upgraded to LIGO advanced and is expected to directly observe some gravitational waves. Since its arms are much shorter than LISA's, it studies different frequency waves. LISA is expected to study waves from merging black holes while LIGO studies those from merging neutron stars and supernovas.

Like others have said, this is just a low point in the fluctuations of a large budget. It's not the first time we've had to cancel expensive projects, and cool science can still be done.