It's much easier to justify wasting money on normal business things every day people understand, like buying office paper. Most people can relate to that, even when things go wrong and money is wasted.

Most people, be they in the deep south or the northeast have no fucking clue what SETI is and may even have very specific metaphysical opinions on how we should deal with the possibility of alien life that doing this violates. Most people don't care enough about paper to do more than write it off as a normal expense.

I personally think that alien life is everywhere and I can't wait until we discover more evidence of it. But I think SETI is a huge waste of resources that could be spent better elsewhere. Even though I'm pro science, discovery, and utilizing wasted cpu cycles, I still think searching for life this way is a huge waste of time and resources and I'd be pissed if some teacher decided he was going to use the resources I take a part in paying for to do this.

The benefits of this are external while the cost is internal. If you're going to use resources, at least use them to benefits the kids who are in your budge.