Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has bad news for Pentagon officials, defense contractors, national park vacationers and other powerful constituencies dealing with the consequences of sequestration: unlike the Federal Aviation Administration, you won’t be getting any special treatment.
At a reporter roundtable in his Capitol Hill suite Wednesday, Reid claimed responsibility for Democrats’ decision to provide the FAA — and only the FAA — unique flexibility under sequestration to move money between accounts, and thus to avoid scheduled tower closures and controller furloughs causing major travel delays that were expected to drag on for months.
“I take all the blame,” Reid acknowledged.
But he now says that powerful stakeholders won’t get elite treatment from Congress to alleviate the impact of sequestration, suggesting the indiscriminate spending cuts will either be addressed in their entirety or not at all.
“I think the next thing I see that’s going to ask for, ‘let’s just take care of this,’ is going to be the Pentagon,” Reid said. “They’re asking already for more money for a number of different things. I think the time has come that we — if something comes up in the military, that we have to understand there are a lot of people out there who don’t have lobbyists, who don’t have people up here to advocate for them.”
“We’ve got the 70,000 kids on head start, meals on wheels, NIH … we have all kinds of issues that sequestration is hurting,” Reid said. “I’m not going to apologize for what we’ve done with air-traffic control, but hopefully in the future we’re going to stop this.”
This is the first time since the FAA bill passed that Reid has claimed that he will not address sequestration in a piecemeal fashion. He made similar public assurances before travel delays became an issue, but then ultimately agreed to grease legislation to fix that problem in isolation.
