I worked as a contractor on a NASA project for a couple of years. Your observation that the purpose of NASA is to consume funds, accrue influence, and generally perpetuate itself matches with many of my experiences of those years. This is what comes to my mind:
I saw sounding rocket missions with overall costs of several million dollars completely lost, in terms of science data, because the telemetry link was lost. Well, we were launching recoverable vehicles and overall data recording needs were just a few Gigabytes over a 15 minute mission, so why not just record that data on-board in case the telemetry link to the ground failed? Oh, I was told, doing that is far too expensive. Well, the cost of a recorder is not even close to the cost of launching a whole research rocket with payload, so the whole thing just struck me as a tremendous waste.
My immediate previous job was as an engineer for the US Navy. I was well familiar with the concept of "colors of money", so I get that sometimes you may be flush with cash for some things (staff, facilities) but devoid of cash for things like equipment purchases. But even in my Navy years I saw obvious stupidities like this eliminated with some financial management. The contractor and NASA management didn't care. They were fine with losing years of time and millions of dollars for want of a $10,000 crash survivable solid state recorder.
The contractor has since merged with a larger competitor, then merged again. That same entity and largely the same people remain in place, managing (and in my opinion, mis-managing) this program. The only people who really seemed to "lose" when mission data was lost, as far as I could tell, were the graduate students working for our Principal Investigators who lost the data they were depending on for their PhD theses...