Defense Spending in Washington Spotlight by Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle. BLUF: “Two Californians will be central to the outcome (US defense budget future). One is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a liberal San Francisco Democrat who helped engineer a provision in the debt deal that exposes the Pentagon to nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. The other is Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman from Monterey who warned in his maiden press conference Thursday that such cuts are ‘completely unacceptable.’”