Turns out that the only way to force the US to commit to a destination in space instead of switching between the Moon and Mars every administration was for NASA to turn it into a large international partnership such that it would hurt the next administration's standing to cancel the program.
That's no guarantee. See Jupiter moon exploration - there were _two_ proposed NASA/ESA ones, both cancelled when NASA pulled out. ESA then did their own one (JUICE) and now NASA is doing a couple of its own, too.
Plus, to a smaller extent there's the idea behind Artemis that all this is a staging ground for our eventual trips to Mars (which, due to the mechanics of it, would have to be a long term thing), where of course the big interest is that it would be another monumental event in human history and politicians would very much like for that to be associated with their name (hell, part of Artemis' motivation was just that they promised to put boots on the Moon before the end of Trump's assumed second term, allowing him to claim to have been the one to oversee America's return to the Moon).
This isn't a video game. You can't just click a button and have an autonomous satellite factory churning out satellites in space. Moving any amount of manufacturing or refining into space is a massive logistics undertaking we haven't even begun to explore. Just because Bezos has a vision of moving the working class off Earth or Musk made some off-the-cuff remarks to rile up his yes-men, that doesn't mean this is something that will happen soon, much less something that will be useful soon.