The Washington Post's Jacqueline Salmon reports on the possibility that legislators will let funding lapse on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. The group, created by Congress, monitors religious freedom around the world and issues a yearly report with recommendations for the State Department's watch list. Funding is set to run out in 2011 unless the measure is renewed. Attempts have already been made to de-fund the Commission.
One Congressional representative recently proposed dramatically cutting the commission's funding. Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz) wrote Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), chair of the House State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, in April proposing that the Commission's $4 million budget begin to be phased out in FY 2010.
A source in Franks' office, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said Franks envisioned the money going to directly to groups on the ground instead of to the commission.
"We were looking at new ways of actually advancing religious freedom and getting more changes on the ground and so we felt that would be a better approach than the commission, which, while it served a useful purpose in the past, has been bogged down a lot in the last couple of year and not really able to fulfill its mandate," the source said.
The new head of the USCIRF, Leonard Leo, has been lobbying members of Congress, Salmon says, about the Commission's importance.
