Morning Briefing

"[T]oday, with the national debt approaching $14.7 trillion, Americans rightly demand fiscal responsibility. Yet efforts in Congress to cut billions from the president's proposed budget for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are short-sighted," Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. He adds that "all of our foreign aid programs and foreign policy initiatives -- from sending diplomats to Afghanistan to helping reverse the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa -- cost less than one-tenth of our annual military expenditures" and "comprises a mere 1.5 percent" of President Obama's FY 2013 budget request.