NASA needs to specifically articulate its long term goals for manned space flight to the American people! We need to know where we're going, why we're going, and how much its going to cost to get there. And we also need to know what kind of a space transportation and habitat infrastructure is going to be required in order to achieve those goals.
The current NASA budget is less than $20 billion dollars annually while at the height of the Apollo Moon program, it was approximately $34 billion (adjusted for inflation). A $30 billion dollar annual NASA budget, IMO, can only be justified if the primary goal is to establish a permanent and continuously growing human presence off the surface of the Earth. In the long term, the US space program should not be designed solely for an elite few astronauts but to give greater access to the New Frontier for private industry and all other Americans.