Hawks in Congress Rally With Defense Industry to Fight Cuts
By Roxana Tiron
BusinessWeek
November 22, 2011
Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) — Republicans on the U.S. House and Senate defense committees say they’ll work to block $500 billion in defense budget cuts threatened by the failure of the deficit supercommittee to reach agreement yesterday.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said he will introduce legislation to prevent the cuts. President Barack Obama said he’d veto any attempt to void the automatic cuts.
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta pressed lawmakers in a statement “to avoid an easy way out of this crisis,” and pass deficit reduction measures at least equal to the $1.2 trillion that the supercommittee was tasked with finding.
“If Congress fails to act over the next year, the Department of Defense will face devastating, automatic, across- the-board cuts that will tear a seam in the nation’s defense,” said Panetta. “I have never been more concerned about the ability of Congress to forge common-sense solutions to the nation’s pressing problems.”
Defense companies and their lobbyists will prepare their “playbooks” to fight automatic cuts next year, said Michael Herson, president of American Defense International (ADI), a lobbying and consulting firm in Washington, DC. ADI’s client roster includes Northrop Grumman Corp. and General Atomics, the maker of the Predator drones.
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