The Air Force had two optical assemblies in storage, that's actually one of the cheapest parts of the entire system, though a very important part. Even if we could launch those "space telescopes" for free they'd be useless, they aren't complete units.
And sure, it'd be nice if we spent more money on space, but that doesn't excuse the huge problems at NASA et al. There is a gap of perhaps an order of magnitude in capabilities between what we are doing and what would be possible if we gave space exploration a higher priority in terms of expenditures. But there is a gap of perhaps 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in capabilities between what NASA is doing and what would be possible if NASA manned spaceflight were run better and smarter.
As an example, the Shuttle program spent around $5 billion a year consistently for nearly 30 years. In that time the major achievement of all that work was to put up the ISS. The ISS is nice now that the expense to put it up is just a sunk cost, but it was in no way worth how much it cost, nor was anything the Shuttle did worth the cost of the program. Ultimately every Shuttle launch ended up costing about as much as a Saturn V launch (and that's a Saturn V launch back at the start of the program, more likely later launches would have become cheaper due to various economies of scale and process improvements). So we had 30 years of operating a hugely expensive low Earth orbit spacecraft instead of 30 years and over 100 launches of a heavy lift rocket capable of sending payloads beyond Earth orbit. We could have had hundreds of people living and working in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars by now, but instead we got the Shuttle and ISS. Some of the fault there comes is due to congress, but there's no excusing the people at NASA from making and committing to these decisions.
The shuttle was a high fixed cost program, but the variable costs aka what you saved by scrapping a launch was fairly low. With 2x the budget they could have done something like 6x times as many launches and each launch could have sent 20-30 people to space. But there is simply little point in sending people to LEO which is the real issue.
NASA started out as a public works project, one of its explicit goals was uplifting (my word) the South, and after Apollo it became almost entirely a public works project.
So that $5 billion a year employing N zillion people became the real goal, not what it was ostensibly about.
There was an IAMA on reddit a while back which was with JPL engineers. One of the engineers was asked what would happen if NASA had the funding of the pentagon. He said space colonies would be there and possibly an interstellar probe.
Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA.
I recall when NASA needed to fix the Hubble telescope and the Air Force had TWO extra space telescopes in storage!