NASA's budget has been increased under Obama and the useless Constellation program has been canceled, pending pork battles. NASA is still planning to spend $2.5B to "close out" Constellation, which is an extraordinary waste and should be stopped; this alone is probably more than the total ever spent on advanced RLV development. But even so, absent Shuttle and Constellation the money is there. Of course we might have to forgo spending hundreds of billions on a new HLV, but we could just order one from ULA if it's ever needed. Without a fully reusable launch vehicle there is no way to make human spaceflight practical.
The challenge would be to let the contractors (Scaled, Orbital, SpaceX, maybe even ULA?) take their RLV ideas to the test flight stage as unmanned demonstration vehicles without NASA loading them up with unnecessary requirements that would triple the weight and cost. And we have to do this before the current excess money in the budget gets vacuumed up into overhead.