The facts:
According to Democratic House Oversight Committee staff, the amount that the GOP-led House passed for two accounts that pay for embassy security in fiscal 2012 ($2.311 billion) was $330 million less than the Obama administration had requested ($2.641 billion).
A GOP House Appropriations Committee aide confirmed the House bill had less in these accounts than what the administration requested.
However, the final bill, after being worked on by the Democratic-led Senate, put in more money than what had passed in the House. The final bill, which passed with bipartisan support, gave a total of $2.37 billion to these accounts for fiscal 2012 -- about $270 million less than what the administration had requested.
From the Congressional Hearings....
At a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on October 10th, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California and the committee’s chairman, talked of “examining security failures that led to the Benghazi tragedy.” He said lawmakers had an obligation to protect federal workers overseas.
On “Face The Nation” on October 14th, Issa did say that if more money was truly needed for embassy security, “Congress would respond.” But he also stressed that he didn’t see money as the reason behind the security failures in Libya: “In the case of our committee, we’re recognizing that there was 2.2 billion dollars in a discretionary fund that could have been used for security, still could be used for security enhancements throughout the region. Plus, the DOD, the military, if we need these things to keep our diplomats safe in these countries, we need to start spending that money and not claim that we don’t have enough money.”
Issa went on to note that Charlene Lamb, the State Department official who fielded security requests from the Libya U.S. diplomatic officials had said that money wasn’t the reason for the slim security in Libya. Consider this exchange from the congressional hearing on Libya last week:
“It has been suggested that budget cuts are responsible for a lack of security in Benghazi, and I’d like to ask Miss Lamb,” said Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.). “You made this decision personally. Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which lead you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”
“No, sir,” said Lamb.
During the hearings, Elijah Cummings, a Democratic congressman from Maryland and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, tried to make the GOP funding cuts a major issue — only to be foiled by Lamb’s response in her exchange with Rohrabacher.
It wasn’t insufficient funds that emerged as the key problem in the hearings; instead, it was the State Department’s refusal to acknowledge that the level of danger in Libya warranted additional security — possibly because of the pressure to not make the decision to get involved in Libya look like a debacle. “In those conversations, I recall I was specifically told you cannot request a SST [Site Security Team] extension,” Eric Nordstrom, who was a regional security officer at the State Department who had been stationed in Libya for several months and had made security requests, testified last week about his conversations with Charlene Lamb. “How I interpreted that was that there was going to be too much political costs, or for some reason, there was hesitancy on that.”