A little-known provision in both Senate and House stopgap plans would strip the State Department of some of its funding for technology that breaks through Internet censors.

Top congressional appropriators tell POLITICO that State hasn’t spent the cash as fast as foreign dictators have shut off access to sites like Facebook, YouTube and Gmail. That’s why they’re now calling for the transfer of the money to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which has stewardship over Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

The provision is baked into Senate Democrats’ continuing resolution, which would fund the government until the end of September. It would transfer “not less than” $15 million of State’s money to support censor-busting technology to the BBG.

House Republicans’ plan, which cleared a vote in February, would transfer a slightly smaller amount of $10 million to the broadcasting agency.

To critics in both parties, the decision to transfer the funds set aside for Internet censorship circumvention technology is a byproduct of State’s slowness to spend it. Since 2008, the department has received about $50 million from Congress to fund technologies that would penetrate the kinds of firewalls used in China — yet critics contend about $30 million of it remains unused.

There is “frustration that funds Congress provided in the past — $50 million so far — have not been utilized in the manner and as quickly as intended,” one Democratic aide on the Senate Appropriations Committee told POLITICO.

The aide noted that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who leads the appropriations subcommittee that has stewardship over State, “doesn’t measure results by how much money is spent.” But, the source continued: “Over several years the Congress, through the budget process, has made clear this is a priority — and the State Department has taken a long time to act.”

A senior official at the State Department told POLITICO last week the agency is spending its money cautiously so that it can diversify the censor-busting technology it supports and fund only those tools that have demonstrated success.

The agency has also redoubled its efforts to fund those tools recently, beginning about the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a February speech on Internet freedom that stressed there is no one solution to addressing Internet censorship.

But a representative for State did not return comment as of press time about what this new funding change would mean for the agency’s work.

Still, the department’s prior assurances have hardly quieted critics in both parties, who have hammered State for failing to spend faster — especially in light of the Internet blackout that swept Egypt and is now imperiling some activists in Libya.

“The Senate CR language is indicative of Congress’s frustration with the State Department’s inability, or unwillingness, to address the censorship circumvention issue for either bureaucratic sloth or perhaps, bilateral reasons related to not wanting to offend certain countries,” one senior Republican staffer told POLITICO.

Among the recent critics is Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who wrote Clinton weeks before she delivered her latest Internet freedom speech. Lugar urged her to transfer some circumvention cash to BBG.

“The BBG is the natural lead government agency in this field,” Lugar wrote in the January letter, obtained by POLITICO. “However, a dearth of funding is now hampering what may well become one of the few areas of foreign assistance likely to receive broad bicameral and bipartisan support in the new Congress.”

Of course, much can change as members continue their budget battle. Democrats and Republicans seem poised to pass another short-term stopgap as negotiations continue on a long-term plan that would keep the government running until the end of September.

Even if lawmakers overcome those political impasses, they’ll have to make a few key decisions on how to handle Internet censorship money. For one thing, they will have to decide whether to give BBG the $10 million the House suggested, or the $15 million the Senate’s bill proposed, and how best to write the language.