Defense budget uncertainties and “pressures on current and projected business” have forced Northrop Grumman to lay off almost 600 workers, a company spokesman said Monday in a statement to the Los Angeles Times…
Reconvening today, the Senate is expected to consider this week a House-passed bill to keep the government running through March. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the House and is supported by the White House, which negotiated the language with Congressional leaders…
The Senate is scheduled to consider a bill Wednesday to address high unemployment among post-9/11 military veterans, under an agreement reached late last week by Democratic and Republican leaders. The bill, S. 3457, would implement President Obama’s Veterans Job Corps authorizing $1 billion over the next five years to hire veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in police and firefighter positions and in conservation, national parks and historic preservation…
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen showed little optimism Monday that Congress will find a bipartisan solution to stop the across-the-board spending cuts planned to take effect Jan. 2. Gates and Mullen appeared together on a panel at the Center for Strategic & International Studies…
The deal congressional leaders reached in July on a six-month stopgap funding measure may help pressure lawmakers to clear the fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill during the lame-duck session. In an effort to keep the continuing resolution relatively “clean” — or free of language providing extra funding or policy changes — appropriators included only a handful of extensions of expiring defense authorizations …
The 394-page report released Friday by the White House intended to provide a detailed picture of the impact of $109 billion in government-wide spending reductions provided very little new information beyond reinforcing previous warnings that the cuts would be “deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.” The impact on defense programs essentially can be boiled down to the report’s estimate that funding for each defense account would be reduced by 9.4 percent if sequestration is imposed on Jan. 2, according to OMB …
The House on Thursday passed legislation that would nullify $55 billion in defense cuts set to be imposed on Jan. 2, but the move likely does not bring Congress any closer to reversing the fiscal 2013 installment of automatic spending reductions as the bill is not expected to be taken up by the Senate. The measure would require President Obama to issue a plan by Oct. 15 to replace the defense cuts with other spending reductions, reported CQ Today. The plan could not, however, include revenue increases …
The base defense budget would receive a $3.1 billion funding increase under the fiscal 2013 stopgap spending measure the House approved Thursday to keep the government running for the first six months of the new fiscal year. Of course, compared to the department’s $516.8 billion base budget in FY 2012, the increase is minuscule. And the gain could be short-lived given the looming threat of $55 billion in automatic cuts this January. Not to mention that the continuing resolution provides funding only through March 27, 2013, and does not represent a full year’s worth of funding …
The White House on Wednesday threatened to veto a measure House lawmakers are expected to consider as soon as today that would require the president to replace the $55 billion in defense cuts set to go into effect in January. The legislation violates last year’s Budget Control Act by failing to call for a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, according to the statement issued by the Office of Management and Budget …
A bipartisan group of eight senators is continuing to make progress on an ambitious plan to slash deficit spending by at least $4 trillion. The plan, which would not be considered by lawmakers until after the November election, may include a fix to stop next year’s automatic spending cuts from going into effect. Recently, the group upped its target for savings to $5 trillion to reflect the spending cuts called for by the Simpson-Bowles Commission as well as the discretionary spending caps in last year’s Budget Control Act …