BOY, THESE REPUBLICAN BENGHAZI HEARINGS ARE GOING TO BE VICIOUS, EH?:

[T]he Trump administration has in fact cut the diplomatic security budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. This, said Brett Bruen, who served as a diplomat in the Obama administration, including a posting to Iraq, has made US foreign service members in places like Baghdad less safe overall.

"Spending on embassy security went down 14% last year, and they're proposing another 18% cut this year, which to me seems like a huge story," Bruen told Quartz. "The administration has been essentially weakening our defenses and what we saw play out yesterday a was in part a result of that. We have not been doing enough to fortify our diplomatic posts, especially with the kind of situation we have in Iraq--they never should have gotten that close. It's just alarming on so many different levels."

The diplomatic security budget did indeed drop precipitously during the past two years, as evidenced by this chart from the US government's fiscal 2019 budget plan, which shows an 11% cut to overall diplomatic security in fiscal year 2020, with 18% specifically cut from embassy security, construction, and maintenance:

The Trump administration's cuts came on top of previous ones by Republican legislators, which began in 2011. Diplomatic security budgets continued to decline, at the insistence of GOP lawmakers, even after the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked in 2012.

When secretary of state Mike Pompeo defended the State Department's budget request before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last May, Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, challenged the Trump administration's position on the subject. The cuts included a $50 million reduction in diplomatic security operations in Iraq "due to the suspension of operations at the U.S. consulate in Basra," the budget proposal explained. In the summer of 2018, the State Department evacuated US personnel and temporarily closed the American consulate in the port city after both the consulate and embassy compound in Baghdad were hit by attacks attributed to Iranian-backed forces.

Pompeo told Meeks that diplomatic security "is not about dollars and spending," but rather, "being thoughtful about where you put people."

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