I wrote earlier this month about the GOP’s plan to lump State Department funds in with “domestic discretionary spending,” and, thus, subject it to massive cuts. At the time, Democrats were warning that this could upend the strategy in Iraq, which involves winding down Defense Department involvement and ratcheting up State Department operations.
I don’t know how common it is for cabinet secretaries to protect departments other than their own from spending cuts. But Robert Gates did that yesterday.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told a Senate committee Thursday that everything the United States has accomplished in Iraq is potentially at risk if the State Department does not get the money it has requested to fund its work there as U.S. forces exit this year….
He said it is “a critically urgent concern” that a planned $5.2 billion allocation for fiscal 2012 be approved, so that the State Department can carry on the training of Iraqi police and other programs once handled by the Pentagon….
Gates compared the situation to the 1980s when “we spent billions to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and we couldn’t get a million dollars to build schools in Afghanistan in 1989 and 1990,” leading to a Taliban takeover.
“The same thing is going to happen in Iraq,” he said, if State doesn’t get its funds.
Read the whole story. This was the Senate, not the House, which is the epicenter of spending cut mania. There appears to be bipartisan support for providing the State Department whatever it needs in the Senate. And there’s practically no better navigator of the federal bureaucracy than Bob Gates. But the House, and most of its ravenous new freshman, would have to get on board with that.
