On Friday, Vice President Cheney’s daughter, Elizabeth, will be taking leave from her post as deputy assistant secretary of state to give birth to her fifth child.

Two State Department officials yesterday confirmed that Friday will be Ms. Cheney’s last day at Foggy Bottom before an open-ended maternity leave. Foreign service officers are eligible for one year of unpaid maternity leave and civil service employees at the State Department can have 12 weeks, though they can apply for more time.

While this is pending good news for Vice President Cheney, it may portend drift for the White House Middle East policy championed in so many of Mr. Cheney’s speeches. Elizabeth Cheney, who is married to attorney Philip Perry, was one of the architects of the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a multi-million dollar aid initiative aimed at spurring democratic reform in the region. She was also instrumental in pushing through the recently announced $75 million aid package for broadcasting pro-democracy programs into Iran and helping that country’s liberal dissidents.

“Liz Cheney was great. She is a person of rare conviction and determination with a smart practical vision,” the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, said. “I can’t imagine we would be pursuing aggressively a policy of outreach to the Iranian people” without her.

Elizabeth Cheney is a former associate at the former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage’s consulting firm. In some ways, her 2003 appointment to the State Department represented a political marriage between the neoconservatives in the administration aligned with her father, and the career foreign service loyal to Mr. Armitage.

But Ms. Cheney soon focused largely on crafting policy in line with the president’s vision to spur democratic reform in the Middle East. To that end, she raised many eyebrows in Congress when she proposed making America’s aid package to Egypt contingent on its political and economic reforms.

In recent months, however, the administration’s push for democracy has lost some of its momentum. Egyptian authorities over the weekend sent thousands of riot police to a demonstration of fewer than 100 people protesting an investigation into judges that re fused to validate last November’s flawed parliamentary elections. The embassy here barely noted the clash in a press statement.

Elizabeth Cheney is not the only daughter of the vice president in the news this week. In a Vanity Fair article set to hit the newsstands this month, Mary Cheney – who is openly gay – says her father was very supportive when she told him of her sexual orientation. According to an item on the Drudge Report yesterday, Mary Cheney says her father’s words “were exactly the ones that I wanted to hear: ‘You’re my daughter, and I love you, and I just want you to be happy.'”