Joe Biden: “the foreign operations appropriation bill is a crucial bill. It is integral to all of our assistance programs overseas.…”

“the foreign operations appropriation bill is a crucial bill. It is integral to all of our assistance programs overseas. The bill's importance to American foreign policy cannot be over emphasized. This bill provides funding for development aid to poor countries, funds to combat terrorism and proliferation of nuclear weapons overseas, and monies for all of the multilateral financial institutions which lend to needy countries. As I see it, the bill before the Senate has two major problems. First, the bill as a whole is significantly under-funded. The amount dedicated to our nation's foreign operations is almost $2 billion below the President's request for funding. I understand that some of this is due to the caps placed on expenditures as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997; however, we in the Senate cannot hide behind that piece of legislation every time we want an excuse for why the administration's appropriations requests are under funded. I am not saying that this is not a legitimate reason for not granting the President's entire request, but $2 billion is an enormous shortfall.”