Show Me the Money

I think you're missing a couple of subtexts.
The NASA directive looks to have two purposes - one to consolidate Science Mission Directorate budget to protect it from raids by Exploration; while the co-operation sub-clause seems to be aimed primarily at DoE collaboration (ie JDEM/SNAP) and maybe also at NSF collaboration (they keep talking, but not much actually happens).

The NOAA clause is serious: the US is now having to buy Earth observing data because they haven't been able to get basic look-down capability into orbit for a long time and the scheduled replacement satellites either failed or are very delayed. And the Earth observation budget is being cut as capability is being lost.
Part of that is a relatively recent attempt by Congress to dump Earth observing responsibility on the NOAA, taking it from NASA, which you'd think would be sensible except NOAA doesn't have the budget or the expertise to do it.
So there is a problem.

I caught the NASA part, though I didn't get that implication from the NOAA bit. 'm still not hugely impressed, though. It's great that they're standing up for basic research at NASA, but in the absence of new funding, I don't think it amounts to all that much.

And just on principle, I'm not really happy with the idea of Congress telling science agencies "You need to do more of such-and-so" without giving them the money to do it. Unfunded mandates are Bad.

If the recommendations of directions for research are translated into guidelines for assessment panels, then what is funded may change. That will come at the expense of other projects that would have been funded under a previous regime, but money is still finite.

What I would like to see more of is the selling of the benefits of funding science research, to the public, because they're the ones paying for it. Research institutions lobby Congress and with some strong results (NSF budget increase when most everything else is under continuing resolution, non-profit exemption from the cap on H1-B visas, for example) but I am not sure that the public get to hear enough that it is their money funding much of the good stuff.

I appreciate that, unless it's pretty Hubble pictures or new planets or black holes or cure for AIDS/Cancer, it's hard to break into the news cycle, but maybe that's not the way to go. Many Americans to whom I have spoken don't really have any understanding of how research is funded at all, or the importance of the government funding; many will pick on a couple of apparently ludicrous funded projects (in which, much like the Stella Liebek McCoffee suit, the whole facts are not explained) and assume that the government is constructing scientific 'bridges to nowhere'.

The fact is that the public pay for this; although I don't expect it to come to that, they have every right, should they wish, to decide to eventually not pay for it at all and leave us all scratching around for the private funding that exists, or shift the money only to government-owned institutes, whatever. If we want more money, sure, lobbying Congress is one way to do it (they are susceptible to it because universities are big employers and attract money and expertise into states and districts) but enthusing the public about the benefits of public funding of science research is a method that I don't think is stressed enough or, at least, has not penetrated far enough into the public conscious. If specific claims about science funding, outside of headline issues like the very possibly oversold stem-cell research, became votewinners then we'd do better.

I am with Stein on the NASA stuff. At nearly every one of the twice-weekly coffee meetings here we have discussions about the effect of Exploration on the NASA Science budget. More money would be great, but reducing the fear that the existing science funding will end up being spent on Moonbases or (most likely doomed) studies of Manned Missions to Mars, etc, would be a good step (and would also help solidify the community behind further exploration, I think). Of course, whether it comes to pass in practice is another matter (and if NSF and NASA could sing from the same sheet on, well, anything, that'd be great, like taking over planetary science at NAIC or agreeing to shared NVO-ish standards, etc).

I've already been paid with your tax dollars to design Moon Bases, Mars Bases, and interstellar robotic probes.

http://magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures/SpacePublications/210Ways.html

Now the money is all gone, to Baghdad and elsewhere.

I long-since spent all of mine on little things like mortgage, utilities, wife, and child. Now I'm looking for work. Hey, I know -- time to write an unsolicited proposal for "high-risk, high-reward innovation acceleration research."

But which of my many speculative papers should I use in the proposal: the ones on imaginary rest mass particles violating conservation of momentum and leaving the brane, the ones on building fusion spoacecraft out of frozen hydrogen mixed with lithium foil and boron fibers, the one on the fine structure constant being encoded in the 20 standard human amino acids, the one on mapping all possible economic systems, the ones on quantum computing, the ones on nanotechnology?

Maybe something about the Kryptonite that they found in that Serbian mine? Obviously that was White Kryptonite; we need to search for Green Kryptonite, Red Kryptonite, and Bizarro Kryptonite.

You want your high risk? I got your high risk right here.

What a golden opportunity for science fiction authors who can write proposals with a straight face. Oh, Greg Bear, about that Big Dumb Object in EON....

halfnium!