AAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!! This is REALLY terrible news. The Advanced Concepts program is where the breakthrough technologies are hatched. This is the kind of research that NASA was created to do. More mundane technologies will be developed and advanced by the private sector, but the really far-out technologies have too low a probabality of success for investors to back them. We only need for 1% of the breakthrough technologies to succeed to pay back the cost of the program 1000 times. This is the kind of stupid decision made when an agency is totally risk averse.
Not really. The Agency effectively has a flat budget and they need to cut wherever they can just to have a fighting chance to keep close to schedule for return to the Moon. NASA is cutting aero programs, parking airplanes, and offering buyouts to retirement-eligible civil servants. As such, the days of keeping little hobby shops like this and others open are over.