GOP Looks to Cut Foreign Aid
Politico reports:
Egypt’s turmoil is a stark reminder of how hard it is to freeze any foreign policy in place — let alone roll back the State Department’s budget to three years ago.
But that’s very much the threat facing President Barack Obama as the new House Republican majority proposes to lump his State and foreign aid requests with “nonsecurity” domestic spending and to cut appropriations to 2008 levels.
The result could be a $16 billion, or nearly one-third, reduction in the resources available to State, which finds itself pitted against domestic programs also facing the ax. The aftermath of one war, in Iraq, and the future conduct of another, in Afghanistan, would be directly affected. And it’s a dramatic reversal of the activist Bush-era philosophy that State must be treated as a dynamic part of the national security budget.
Not so long ago, Gen. Colin Powell was talking up his “diplomatic troops” before a Republican Congress, and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice seemed to have brought her title with her when she became secretary of State. By contrast last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the new tea party wunderkind, proposed to do away with the entire foreign aid budget and the Republican Study Committee filed its own bill to terminate U.S. economic aid to Egypt and wipe out the Agency for International Development.
These moves come at a time when GOP retirements and tea party primary challenges have made Republicans more reluctant to speak up for foreign aid. In the Senate Appropriations Committee, virtually every active Republican member who served on the State and foreign operations subcommittee in the last Congress is now gone. In the House, Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) has been thrust into the role of heading the equivalent subcommittee with only two years of experience on the panel.
“I’m distressed that there is not enough recognition of the role the State Department is playing,” said Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is facing a potential tea party challenge to his 2012 reelection campaign. “It’s a new leadership group, and they are attempting to express that they are different and it’s a different time. And they’re apparently succeeding.”
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