** Available for interviews: Miriam Pemberton, Research Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies **

Defense funding expert Miriam Pemberton has co-authored an annual “Unified Security Budget” report, an annually-released proposal for cutting waste in security spending and changing the security budget toward expenditures that make us safer. She is available for comment on President Obama’s proposal for a new “smaller and leaner” military.

Pemberton states:

“The President followed his bold action in defying Congress to get his consumer protection bureau going by announcing a new military strategy that is timid in the extreme. It promises reductions in post-911 military spending and then, in the next breath, promises that we’ll be spending more on the military than the Bush administration did. “Turning the page on a decade of war,” as he termed this historical moment, requires reversing the 9-11 military buildup. Adjusted for inflation, the budget he will announce at the end of the month takes tiny, wholly inadequate steps in that direction.”

Miriam Pemberton is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing and speaking on demilitarization issues for its Foreign Policy In Focus project. She has recently published a report, “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era ,” a follow-up to her other publication, “The Budgets Compared: Military vs. Climate Security.” Miriam also leads a group that produces the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.” Formerly she was editor, researcher and finally director of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

With William Hartung of the New America Foundation, she is co-editor of the book “Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War” (Paradigm Publishers, 2008).

Members of the media seeking to interview Miriam Pemberton should contact Media Relations Manager Lacy MacAuley at (202) 445-4692, lacy@ips-dc.org.