The White House on Tuesday used its request for more cybersecurity funding to beat up on Republicans in Congress for refusing to consider the administration’s larger fiscal 2017 budget request.
“I guarantee you that at some point over the next year, we’re all going to file into the briefing room, and I will walk in and find many of you on the edge of your seats eager to ask the White House about the latest cyberintrusion,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.
“I will certainly make detailed note of the significant investments we are proposing to enhance our cybersecurity, and you can be certain that I will point out that when we put forward this proposal, Republicans on the Budget Committee refused to even discuss it,” he added.
The Senate Budget Committee is refusing to hold a hearing on the president’s overall $4.1 trillion budget request. “The president’s final budget continues his focus on new spending proposals instead of confronting our country’s massive overspending and skyrocketing $19 trillion in debt,” said committee Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.
The president has requested $19 billion for cybersecurity funding, an increase of about $5 billion over the current year. Of that, a little over $3 billion would go toward upgrading federal computer systems.
“We’re going to really secure [federal systems] in a serious way, and we need to upgrade them,” President Obama said the same day. “That is something that we all should agree on. This is not an ideological thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic president or a Republican president.
“We believe we’ll be able to execute this in an effective way if Congress provides us the budgetary support to make this happen. And they should,” he added.
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Though Republicans have objected to the larger budget, they have not spoken to the cybersecurity component.
