House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Ca
from Politico.com
By JOHN F. HARRIS | 1/27/10 4:39 PM EST
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that defense spending shouldn’t be exempt from President Barack Obama’s proposal for a three-year freeze on federal spending.
In his State of the Union address Wednesday night, Obama is expected to address worries about the federal deficit by proposing a three-year freeze on all “non-security” spending. But just hours before the speech, Pelosi told POLITICO that any spending freeze should be “across the board.”
“Everybody has to make a sacrifice,” the San Francisco Democrat said in an interview conducted as part of POLITICO’s “Inside Obama’s Washington” video series. “If you’re asking everybody else in the country who has an interaction with the federal government – and that means our states and cities and all the rest, too – to cut back, then I think we have to subject every federal dollar to the very harshest scrutiny.”
Pelosi, an early Iraq War opponent who has championed increases in domestic spending programs, told POLITICO that it’s “hard to make the case” to completely exempt the Pentagon from a spending freeze, saying that there has to be “some room” to cut “five percent” from the defense budget by targeting waste among contractors and the sprawling defense bureaucracy — provided such reductions had no direct impact on troops in the field, commanders or veterans.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32094.html#ixzz0dr9qo1JB
