Funding request ‘does not make a lot of sense’ – senior Democratpublished at 21:03 BST<\/p>\n
21:03 BST<\/p>\n
Before the question on the costs of the Iran war that we brought you in our previous post, it was the turn of the most senior Democrat on the committee, Patty Murray, to ask questions. <\/p>\n
She says the funding request “does not make a lot of sense” and asks why the money is needed.<\/p>\n
Murray says this request has been sold as an emergency request for funds, but accuses the administration of attempting to “skirt the normal appropriations process”.<\/p>\n
She says it includes $800m (\u00a3598m) for the National Guard to patrol Washington DC, more than $1 billion (\u00a3750m) for the Army to patrol the US’s southern border, and $900m (\u00a3672m) to support “illegal boat strikes in the Caribbean”.<\/p>\n
Hegseth replies, saying the “gross negligence” of the Biden administration means the department is having to “re-establish deterrence”.<\/p>\n
Murray interjects, asking how the administration can claim to have destroyed Iran’s capabilities when they are currently firing missiles at US assets.<\/p>\n
Hegseth says the amount of damage the US military has inflicted has left Iran “in the worst place they have ever been”. <\/p>\n
He adds they have destroyed some of Iran’s capabilities, but the regime has also hidden some underground. <\/p>\n
“That’s what terror regimes would do, so I will acknowledge they still have capabilities, no doubt,” he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Funding request ‘does not make a lot of sense’ – senior Democratpublished at 21:03 BST 21:03 BST Before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":817305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-817304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}