Mike Honda: “I regret that I am unable to be in Washington, DC today to cast a vote on H.R. 1765, The Reducing Flight Delays Act.…”

“I regret that I am unable to be in Washington, DC today to cast a vote on H.R. 1765, The Reducing Flight Delays Act. When House Republicans refused to compromise on tax and spending issues and raising the statutory debt limit, the Budget Control Act of 2011 was enacted in order to avert a fiscal crisis. The BCA provided for automatic reductions to most federal discretionary spending, referred to as ``sequestration,'' if no agreement on deficit reduction could be reached. Policy analysts, economic experts and the American people agreed that the automatic spending cuts would be so damaging, and were such bad policy, that Congress would be compelled to act to avoid them. I did not believe that these cuts were the right course of action, and so I voted against the BCA. Unfortunately (but predictably), Congress was unable to reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan, and sequestration went into effect on March 1, 2013. As we are now experiencing, sequestration requires agencies to reduce non-defense discretionary spending by 5.3 percent in Fiscal Year 2013. It does not provide any guidance on how each agency should go about implementing these cuts, it simply reduces spending across the board, impacting all federal programs.…”