Taiwan's opposition-controlled parliament approved the island's annual defence budget late on Friday, August 14, ending a delay of 266 days that the legislature's speaker said had left the government at an impasse [1]. The roughly $93 billion package retained funding for Taiwan's drone programme, reversing an earlier push by the Kuomintang to cut that money sharply [1].
The opposition had floated a proposal to "slash that funding by 70 percent," according to Al Jazeera, before abandoning the idea [1]. It dropped the cut after concluding "there was no wasteful overlap between the development and procurement programmes," the report said, meaning the money paying to design drones was not simply duplicating the money paying to buy them [1].
Han Kuo-yu, the legislative speaker, said the prolonged standoff had caused "social division and a constitutional impasse" [1]. The 266-day gap between the start of the fiscal deadlock and Friday's vote is the longest such delay on record for a Taiwan defence budget [1].
The reason the drone line drew a fight sits in the numbers around it. Al Jazeera reported that Taiwan's military holds "fewer than 5,000 drones," while China is reported to have "ordered close to a million for delivery this year" [1]. A cut to Taiwan's development and procurement programmes would have widened a gap already counted in the hundreds of thousands.
The budget still carried cuts elsewhere. It reduced special allowances for government agency heads by 60 percent, trimmed military equipment and facilities spending by 2.5 percent, and cut media policy and publicity budgets by 50 percent [1].
This was not the opposition's first move against defence spending. In May, the opposition-controlled legislature cut a proposed $40 billion special defence budget by 38 percent, eliminating funding for domestically produced combat drones while preserving U.S. arms purchases, Al Jazeera reported [1]. Friday's vote reversed the direction of that earlier decision on drones, keeping the domestic programme funded inside the annual budget rather than stripping it out.
