The Blackbird is a deeply awesome machine, and hn understandably loves it. But this initiative is almost certainly about agency funding and access to budget, not engineering.

The Orange Entity sets the direction and his congress provides the money. My guess would be that NASA has been told that the direction that leads to there being money is to forget the space telescopes and other science, and instead to focus on national prestige projects (Moon, Mars) and things that will feed through to military applications (hypersonic flight).