State Department braces for budget cuts

The State Department, like other federal agencies, is bracing for painful budget cuts.

"We're going to have to do more with less — or less with less, depending on how you look at it," Thomas R. Nides, the deputy secretary of state for management and budget, told the New York Times' Steven Lee Myers.

The Obama administration requested $59 billion for the State Department's operations and foreign assistance budget for the new fiscal year, which began October 1.

Proposed cuts by the Republican-controlled House appropriations subcommittee would reduce that by $12 billion, or 20 percent, to $47 billion, Myers reports.

The foreign assistance budget was cut by $8 billion last spring. Foreign aid accounts for only 1 percent of the federal budget.

Proposed cuts by the Democratic-led Senate appropriations subcommittee would cut the administration's proposed budget slightly more modestly, to $53 billion, with the proposed reductions coming across the board.

One area where Republicans and Democrats decline to cut?

"One of the largest portions of foreign aid — more than $3 billion for Israel — is left untouched in both the House and Senate versions, showing that, even in times of austerity, some spending is inviolable," Myers writes.

Thirty former senior American cabinet officials and members of Congress--including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, former Deputy Secretary of State and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, and former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton--signed a letter arguing for sustaining American funding of the United Nations in full page ads published in four newspapers Thursday. The ads were organized by a bipartisan group called the Partnership for a Secure America.