NASA Denies Funding for Key Satellite (washingtonpost.com)

NASA Denies Funding for Key Satellite (washingtonpost.com):

"NASA is allowing a highly successful satellite to fall out of Earth's orbit by refusing to fund it for as little as $28 million, dismaying the scientists and forecasters who use its unique abilities to study climate change and track hurricanes."
 
Some possible explanations:
 
If you don't want to acknowledge climate change, then its not a good idea to fund data collection that would document the change?
 
Good unmanned missions are more cost effective than manned missions. Planning future missions costs less now than funding ongoing missions, future administrations have to pay the costs of new missions, and indeed will suffer from the information lost from prematurely discontinued missions. Manned missions generate more public interest and more political benefit from the party in power than do unmanned missions. If politics matter more than knowledge, one might prematurely curtail current unmanned missions to plan future manned missions.