[Editor’s Note: With Congress scheduled to vote on the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act this month, sequestration will be the giant hiding behind the door. The effects of sequestration are ignored by the bill (as they are ignored by the administration’s budget.) Into this vacuum steps the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association, who heads EADS NA, the North American subsidiary of the European defense giant. Read below what Sean O’Keefe believes must be done.]
Forrest Gump was right. “Stupid is as stupid does.” It is coming as no surprise that “sequestration,” the dumbest fiscal management policy ever conceived, is already producing some pretty mindless results.
As bad as the damage is from enduring automatic salami-slicing of budget line items, perhaps what is worse is the evisceration of already low public confidence in both legislative and executive branch leadership, coupled with the complete demoralization of the career public service facing furloughs on a regular basis for the next several months.
Sequestration was created by frustrated budget negotiators who felt that the pain it might portend would be so great that surely wiser heads would prevail and a budget deal would be achieved. Clearly, the negotiators underestimated our government’s capacity for sustaining self-inflicted wounds. It is as if the now-recognized “Mayhem” guy of Allstate commercial fame has found a new job.
The reports are just beginning to come in, but you don’t have to look hard to find plenty of near-term decisions that will make savings at the margin only to create larger bills in the future. Public leaders don’t try to make nonsensical decisions — but there is something about the current budgetary environment that makes such actions more likely. It is as if we have rendered null and void Winston Churchill’s observation, “Gentlemen, we have run out of money, now we have to think.”
Keep reading this article at: http://breakingdefense.com/2013/06/10/the-gump-guide-to-sequestration-dumbest-fiscal-management-policy-ever/
