House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is interviewed by POLITICO on Wednesday, January 27, 2009. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Pelosi cool to Obama's freeze plan

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that defense spending shouldn’t be exempt from President Barack Obama’s proposal for a three-year freeze on federal spending.

In his State of the Union address Wednesday night, Obama is expected to address worries about the federal deficit by proposing a three-year freeze on all “non-security” spending. But just hours before the speech, Pelosi told POLITICO that any spending freeze should be “across the board.”


“Everybody has to make a sacrifice,” the San Francisco Democrat said in an interview conducted as part of POLITICO’s “ Inside Obama’s Washington” video series. “If you’re asking everybody else in the country who has an interaction with the federal government — and that means our states and cities and all the rest, too — to cut back, then I think we have to subject every federal dollar to the very harshest scrutiny.”

Pelosi, an early Iraq War opponent who has championed increases in domestic spending programs, told POLITICO that it’s “hard to make the case” to completely exempt the Pentagon from a spending freeze, saying that there has to be “some room” to cut “5 percent” from the defense budget by targeting waste among contractors and the sprawling defense bureaucracy — provided such reductions had no direct impact on troops in the field, commanders or veterans.

Hill liberals, including Pelosi, have responded coolly to Obama’s proposal, which could save as much as $250 billion over the next decade by freezing spending on discretionary domestic programs that are close to Democratic policy priorities.

On the flip side, congressional Republicans have blasted the move as a political window-dressing that will reduce the aggregate deficit by about 1 percent and do nothing to impede the explosive growth of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

For her part, Pelosi questioned the fairness of Obama’s proposal, which is intended to shield spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars without arousing opposition from hawks.

“Well, I think that if there is going to a spending freeze, it should be across the board. That is to say, we all want a strong national defense, and we want to fund it in an appropriate way,” she said. “But we’re not here to protect defense contractors. … And the fact is, if we have to cut spending, we should subject every dollar to that same scrutiny.”

The full interview will be available Thursday morning at http://www.politico.com/insideobamaswashington/.

Glenn Thrush contributed to this report.