That is exactly the point the TS was making, spending the money on NASA instead of DARPA would be a huge improvement, shifting the focus away from war.

Not that that is ever going to happen.

Perhaps you're missing my point. I'm suggesting that money from the military spending budget could be moved over to NASA without losing any ability to drive forward new technology.

I'd say that even if there was, that message wouldn't get through. There are many reasons that people vote for one party over another, there's nowhere on a ballot paper to indicate why the vote is being cast.

If you were running a political party, the most logical assumption to make (in the absence of richer feedback) was that the people that voted for you did so because they liked your manifesto and/or believed you'd be more competent than your competition.

With that in mind, an election doesn't really allow any meaningful influence on policy, it has to come in a different form (direct democracy, for example).

I'm not a US citizen, but from what I've read the laws on direct democracy are set at the state level, is that correct? Are there any mechanisms in place to propose policy changes at the federal level (aside from lobby groups in Washington)?

Imagine if your country had basically no military technology or ongoing research. Well that's how my country Tunisia is, and of course the rest of Middle East and North Africa. It's easy to say "military funded research is bad" when your country (ex: USA) is at the top of the world when it comes to defense and state-of-the-art weaponry.

By developing our own tech, we can avoid depending on foreign suppliers, at least in some areas. This will help with improving national security and decreasing the obscenely high maintenance costs imposed by these suppliers in the long run.

Advancement in military technology will then allow us to apply the lessons learned, supply chains developed, factories built, and so on, to the civilian space. Look at Israel for example. They have an entire startup scene growing around the military. Many of the people who work in the military go on to start their own defense companies. These companies then give back to both military and civilian tech (Microsoft Kinect, for instance).