Washington, DC is echoing with a chorus of “sequester fear.” It is an election year and the cacophony is deafening: sequester is a budgetary Pearl Harbor, a “doomsday machine” that will shred our national security. The Pentagon says it, members of Congress from both parties say it, and the defense industry is jumping up and down. Keep reading →
WASHINGTON: Congress must act by fall — before the election — and pass some sort of answer to sequestration, says the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Carl Levin told reporters that his colleagues are beginning to focus on the fact that layoff notices for hundreds of thousands of defense and government jobs will begin going out before the election. The top defense policy lawmaker in the Senate pointed to this week’s statement by GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham that he had “crossed a Rubicon” and would agree to — effectively — raising some taxes to avoid a fiscal meltdown before the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration take effect Jan. 3. Keep reading →
Colin Clark
Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.