The Bush kiss of death is pretty famous by now, praise in public, but cut funds in private, but it sems this would be a little too brazen even for Bush co., i think. What would be his motivation for ruining NASA anyway? Texas is one of the chief beneficiaries of federal funding on NASA.
I feel like I'm just being shrill on this one, but I suggest that Bush's military planners would like to see civilians edged out of orbit, and that GOP ideologues would like to see big earth-science missions edged out of the federal budget. Bush's connection to Texas wouldn't be that big a deal: military space missions would still employ lots of Texans, and anyway it's probably more Bush's people than bush himself who'd want an even smaller, less influential NASA.
"there are no more expensive planetary-science missions, no more satellite analyses of the earth's surface temperature"
No more US missions. There are other countries in the world, they are rising as the US sinks, and the federal government doing whatever it can to demean the standing of science will only accelerate the process.
Like many of Bush's proposals, the real cost doesn't show up until later. So he can be a grand starter, and let someone else be the realist.