Milbank: House GOP cut embassy security funding $331 million in fiscal 2012
Forget Big Bird. What about the Snuffleupagus in the room?
By Dana Milbank, Published: October 9, WaPost
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As if to remind us of this, Rep. Darrell Issa, the indefatigable Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has called a hearing for noon Wednesday even though Congress is in a weeks-long recess. The emergency cause for the hearing? Probing “The Security Failures of Benghazi” — lapses in diplomatic security that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.
The purpose of the pre-election hearing, presumably, is to embarrass the administration for inadequate diplomatic security. But Issa seems unaware of the irony that diplomatic security is inadequate partly because of budget cuts forced by his fellow Republicans in Congress.
For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15?billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.
Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.
The Romney campaign argues that such extrapolations are unfair, because Romney and Ryan haven’t specified which programs they would cut and by how much. And that’s the problem: The danger in Romney’s plan is not in the few cuts he has detailed but in the many he has not. If Romney follows through on the tax cuts he has endorsed, increases defense spending by $2.1 trillion over a decade as promised and maintains Social Security and Medicare as they are for those 55 and older, he’d need to cut everything else government does by nearly a third — or more than $200 billion — in 2016.
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