{"id":231607,"date":"2010-01-26T12:33:53","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T17:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=74802"},"modified":"2010-01-26T12:33:53","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T17:33:53","slug":"feb-2-your-day-of-defense-budget-reckoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/231607","title":{"rendered":"Feb. 2: Your Day of Defense Budget Reckoning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If it doesn&#8217;t make any sense to you to spare defense programs from the spending freeze, pay attention to next Tuesday. At 8:30 a.m., Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy heads to the Council on Foreign Relations to explain the results of the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon&#8217;s master planning document that spells out defense priorities and guides its medium-term budgeting. In any QDR, you can read between the lines and find defense programs that don&#8217;t fit into the overall document&#8217;s vision of a prudent defense. Cutting those programs is a good test of an administration&#8217;s commitment to fighting Pentagon bloat.<span id=\"more-74802\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>But only spend an hour with Flournoy! At 9:30 a.m., Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the next year&#8217;s defense budget. Watch to see if Gates and Mullen say that they&#8217;re using the QDR &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/37802\/gates-n-cartwright-why-does-every-service-have-to-do-everything\">as they&#8217;ve indicated in the past<\/a> &#8212; to guide further defense cuts to wasteful programs.<\/p>\n<p>Also, I don&#8217;t see a link yet, but CNN&#8217;s Dana Bash <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/DanaBashCNN\/statuses\/8242485154\">tweets<\/a> that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) says that the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security should be included in the spending freeze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If it doesn&#8217;t make any sense to you to spare defense programs from the spending freeze, pay attention to next Tuesday. At 8:30 a.m., Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy heads to the Council on Foreign Relations to explain the results of the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon&#8217;s master planning document that spells out defense [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}