Yes, and the equivalent of 175 billion dollars per year (4% of federal budget times 4.4T$/y). I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the money may have helped, too.
The total expenditure in the 2018 United States budget was $4.109 trillion[2] or %0.34 of yearly expenditures. Budgets do not follow inflationary trends even remotely, the 1961 expenditure[3] was $181.588 billion (wow that's pretty crazy). For the year that makes the Apollo program %1.2 of the federal expenditure.
Another useful point of reference, the entire NASA organization in 2018 had an operating budget of $19.2 billion and this has to cover all of the mandated projects such as the SLS. They're also responsible for maintaining and monitoring a lot of infrastructure for other agencies (the weather service, DSN, etc) which wasn't the case during the Apollo mission. NASA itself is kind of left with scraps.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...
[3]: https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1960_1970USb_...
Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.
In any case, thanks for digging up more numbers.
I stand by my claim that money (and enough assurance of continued money to bet everything on one large project) is key.
The CPI is composed of much more than that: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2016.pdf
No it's not. Maybe normalize to the median income if you don't like bread and milk, but how much the government spends on education, health care, interest, military fleets, farm subsidies... that's not relevant to NASA's budget.