NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.
Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.
By my estimate, SpaceX has saved the US government 10s of billions by reducing launch costs with Falcon 9, developing Dragon, Starlink, etc.
DragonX is the smaller and leaner government.
No, it’s a private for profit corporation.
NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.
Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.