FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 12, 2013
Thornberry: Budget agreement ‘saves more, spares the military, and makes changes to automatic spending’
Washington, D.C.–Congressman Mac Thornberry (R-Clarendon) made the following comments after voting to support the two-year budget agreement:
“This budget agreement maintains the sequester savings and then saves even more. It also spares our country’s military from bearing the brunt of deeper cuts. In 2014, all of the additional spending cuts fall on the Department of Defense, and this bill replaces those cuts with modest changes in mandatory spending. It is not nearly enough, but it begins to reform that part of the budget where most of the spending is. It does all of this without raising taxes.
More specifically, this agreement keeps the strict spending caps set under the Budget Control Act (BCA) in place. It also achieves 100 percent of the Budget Control Act’s deficit reduction, but goes even further by reducing the deficit an additional $23 billion. The difference is that this new agreement achieves that deficit reduction in a smarter, more targeted way than the arbitrary sequester cuts required by the BCA.
Even the user fees cut spending in this agreement. When airline passengers pay a greater share of the costs for their security, when private companies pay more for a federal guarantee of their pensions, or when federal employees pay more of their retirement costs, the taxpayer pays less. That is a small but commonsense victory.
This agreement is far from ideal. In many areas, it does not go as far as I would like. There are provisions, such as modest reforms to retired military Cost of Living Adjustments, I prefer were not included.”
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