The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
Also, if you dont think Apollo had pork in it, you're not aware enough of the history, the various assembly plants were placed mostly for political support, the shuttle and now SLS follows the same pattern.
Possibly none, until we can figure out how to engineer political institutions that function without pork.
We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture for political scientists is more mixed.
Turns out it's easier to bargain with legislators when policy can give them a win in their districts or states. It greases the wheels for negotiation or provides levers to flip opposition party members. Legislatures often become more sclerotic and dysfunctional after reforms to pork barrel spending.
I don't want to call pork good, but there are real trade-offs to pork-free government that we haven't figured out how to solve any other way
The reality is that "anything" can be pork - if you have large amounts of money sloshing around, someone benefits from getting it, and you can use that benefit for negotiations.
The first question for me is always is this a thing worth doing - which has an aspect of price involved, but isn't the definitive answer.
