But we know that worker abuses inside Elon Musk's companies are pretty bad, and I'd rather have a bit of pork than employees who are expected to put in 120-hour weeks.
The first thing I would say is that if people feel they are being abused at SpaceX or Tesla, they are free take their cases to a worker's rights organisation or leave and find a less demanding job. There isn't exactly a shortage of jobs in aerospace. If I was 40 years younger, I'd be happy to be putting in 120 hour weeks as an Aerospace Engineer somewhere like SpaceX, or Blue Origin or Rocketlab. Its about on a par with what I was doing anyway as an Avionics Engineer at that time of my life in the NZ military.
The second thing is that workers rights in the private sector is not "political" politics.
The third thing is that "Pork Barrel Politics" is another word for corruption. You are surely not OK with corruption?
Now I might be coming across as a bit of a fanboy of SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocketlab, and that is because I am. I see them doing things that have advanced space technology more in the past 5-10 years than NASA has in the last forty. FFS, two of them are working toward 100% re-usability of their hardware (and the third has announced plans to recover and re-use their first stage). SpaceX is already bringing back large percentages of their launch hardware and re-using it, doing little more than kicking the tyres and topping up the water and oil before pumping in the fuel, loading up another payload and sending it into orbit for their customer. No-one has done this sort of thing to this level before (and anyone who wants to claim STS was reusable in the way SpaceX hardware is, can go whistle Dixie).
Part of the reason why they are able to do all this because they are not subject to the whims, fancies and political ambitions of corrupt politicians. This allows them to set long term goals without having to worry about changes of government bringing changes of attitudes and funding cuts.
For the last 40 years, I have been disappointed by the great, promising space projects that have been cancelled or dramatically reduced at the political whims of self-interested or short-sighted politicians. Some examples are the Europa Orbiter, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism probe, X-38 and HL-20 CRV, and most of all the Constellation program - had Constellation not been canned, we would probably already be back on the Moon by now.
Right now, I have the same feeling of excitement about the future of space that I did as a pre-teen and teenager during the Gemini-Apollo programmes of the 1960's. These private space companies are going ahead apace, something that is much easier to do without the Congressional "Sword of Damocles" hanging over them all the time.