With the election decided, lawmakers have returned to Washington with just seven weeks to negotiate an agreement to avert sequestration, which would impose about $1 trillion in cuts to Pentagon spending and domestic programs. The crude across-the-board cuts of sequestration are not smart budget policy. But these negotiations present an opportunity for Congress to take a step towards a more efficient national security budget and correct the imbalance in funding between the two pillars of American national security, the Department of State and the Department of Defense.
As Congress looks for more areas to cut in this time of austerity, lawmakers must remember that the Department of Defense has continued to receive a disproportionate amount of the nation’s security funding — in spite of unprecedented cost overruns and incidents of gross mismanagement — while the State Department remains chronically underfunded and continually subject to the threat of cuts.
The above excerpt was originally published in The Huffington Post.
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