[skyebook]

With regards to your political argument, its something I've often thought about because it can go either way. There's the loaded language approach as you mention, but there's also the possibility of the hypothetical member of the House or Senate saying "And apparently we’re paying the Geological Survey $N million a year to run a web server that no one is making use of and funding data that no one seems to care about."

This would be a hard argument to defend against as it directly hits the value derived from the service rather than the idea that the service itself exists. In either case, I couldn't agree with you more that the civilian agencies really get a raw deal (and I'm sure its only compounded by the mostly stagnant level of people graduating with STEM degrees[1])

[1] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/digest12/stem.cfm#3