Joe Courtney

I believe there remains bipartisan interest in both chambers of Congress to avoid these broad and indiscriminate cuts to our federal budget.

The notion that that employer was obligated to have a mass blanket WARN notice, frankly, is just completely disconnected from the reality of how they hire and how they build programs that take years to complete from start to finish.

Sequestration would be a disaster for this country in terms of having, again, an indiscriminate mechanism go through the domestic budgets and national security budgets of this country.

The topic of sequestration is probably the most critical facing our country in the near term.

I look forward to working with you.

I am hopeful but I am not optimistic that we are going to avoid this.

The President called for a drawdown to 34,000 troops by the end of this year.

This is not stuff that, you know, again, you can just sort of eat with a flat line from last year's CR.

The fact is, though, that the Navy has other issues here in terms of CR's impact on your O&M account, repair and maintenance.

The objective of Gramm-Rudman was to have the threat of the sequester force compromise and action.

We can't continue to run a trillion-dollar deficit every year and not have it impact every aspect of our society.

I have a concern about that.

Nobody wants the sequester. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

I personally think at this point we need to stop torturing the discretionary portion of the budget.

And obviously it has a ripple effect on the workforce when you cancel repairs, you know, planning for having folks in the shipyards obviously takes a hit when that happens.

The fact is is that Congress still has more work to do in terms of the CR and its impact in terms of keeping a fleet that is ready to fulfill its mission.

And that is our job, that is really how we fix this, not sort of finger pointing about whether or not people were doing planning for the indiscriminate cuts which Secretary Carter described those I think about two or three times before…

That really should be what we are focused on.

It was never the objective of Gramm-Rudman to trigger a sequester. The objective of Gramm-Rudman was to have the threat of the sequester force compromise and action.

The impact in terms of the Navy's budget for repair and maintenance... means that 23 ship repair and availabilities are going to be canceled.

The fiscal uncertainty that is out there right now is what I am hearing when I am back home.

And, frankly, you know, your organization and your members, by the way, it is not just the big OEMs that are worried about the sequestration.

I mean you will recall that many economists, and I think Members of this body, were very much worried about the impact of the fiscal cliff on the economy.

Again, my largest school district is going to lose two Head Start programs if the domestic discretionary cuts go into effect.

If sequestration and the CR, by the way, go into effect, the impact in terms of the Navy's budget for repair and maintenance...means that 23 ship repair and availabilities are going to be canceled.