The situation:

The next step in our Cultural Assault is to get temples into Macao and Justinian. The Cultural Department is working on Justinian.

The Foreign Department budget has 50 gold in it.

The Foreign Department plan will bring in 94 gold plus 7 gold per turn as well as possible additional funds from the sale of extorted technology.

This only puts us part way to the rush price of the Macao temple. Eyrei has given us permission to use the discretionary budget if a concensus on this expense can be achieved.

EDIT: Link to the budget thread where this was discussed. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=287563#post287563)

You need about three more votes in favor to convince me, as that would be about half of our more diligent citizens. I am pretty sure this will happen....

Edit: The magic number is 13.

Just in time, looks like I am lucky number 13! Had modem trouble today, still trying to get through everything, but I got my vote in.

I'm number 14 so I guess it'll be a yes.
I think any department should be able to give to a different department regardless of the expense being directly or indirectly related to the department.
If the culture dept. wanted to give 50 gold to the military to rush a musketman to prevent the culture flip with a bigger garrision, let the culture department do it. If the trade dept wanted the borders of a city to expand to include furs they should be allowed to give 100 gold to the culture dept to rush a temple to get the furs in 10 turns. Just a couple of examples I thought of to rationalise it :)