CNO to Hill: Reprogram By January Or Programs ‘Paralyzed’ (or Still Bitching About 5% Budget Cut)

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/10/cno-to-hill-reprogram-by-january-or-programs-paralyzed/



CNO to Hill: Reprogram By January Or Programs ‘Paralyzed’
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on October 31, 2013 at 11:32 AM

PORTSMOUTH, VA: Go ahead and cut our budget across the board if you really have to. But please, then give us authority to move money around to save our top priorities — and give it to us soon. That’s the message, in a nutshell, from the Navy’s top officer.

“If we get sequestered” — and there’s no sign a gridlocked Congress can get it together to repeal the automatic spending cuts — “we want to reprogram money and we’d really like to do it by January,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert said yesterday afternoon at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Expeditionary Warfare conference.

“We would typically start (the) negotiations for a ship contract in January,” Greenert explained to reporters after his public remarks. If Congress approves the Navy’s reprogramming request by then, it can move a billion dollars around within its investment accounts, sacrifice lower priorities, and enter negotiations on its top priority programs able to assure defense contractors they’ll actually get paid.

“The drop-dead [deadline] varies by contract,” Greenert said. But the longer Congress takes, the worse it gets: “two, three, four months…. (If) by halfway through the year, we have no contract negotiations going on, no indication that we’re going to, then it starts getting hard.”




unhappycamper comment: “If we get sequestered”.... Dude, you've already been sequestered; you lost 5% of your budget. Stop bitching and make it work.