What technical or engineering knowledge do you have to support your opinions, because that is all they are. You are repeating the opinions of others, of course. Yes, NASA budget is not large compared to the entire budget, but a billion here, a billion there, soon we are talking trillions....
And Mars is not going to be made habitable by just repeating the opinions of others and/or spending more money on the project.
The accumulative occurrences that makes Earth habitable are numerous, it is pure luck that conditions here allow life. Do you really think that we can terraform Mars, give it an atmosphere, boost its temperature, boost its gravity, etc.?
About 50 years ago I read Popular Science regularly, my father's favorite magazine. A lot of the same pipe dreams that were written about then are still being written about....and it makes gullible people invest in things that are never going to happen. Example, Fusion is still at least another 50 years away and is NOT as easy, safe and pollution free as some would have us believe. Second example, the aerocar works, but is stupid. Do we want the average person flying? No, the average person is dangerous enough driving.
I see some pretty stupid antinuke stuff on one TV show, and the next day some pretty stupid gushing about how wonderful the next imaginary power source is going to be.
If you are not educated in engineering, energy, physics, chemistry, you will be easily fooled by these media jerks who report on things they know nothing about...