WASHINGTON, D.C. – With the threat of the return of sequestration in 2016, U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) today, during two separate committee hearings, spoke out against the law that indiscriminately cuts spending across the entire government as a misguided attempt to fix the nation’s budget deficit and growing debt.

During a Senate Budget Committee hearing this morning with Dr. Doug Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Senator King slammed sequestration’s reduction of spending for discretionary programs, such as Head Start or those within the Defense Department, as “like attacking Brazil after Pearl Harbor. It’s a vigorous reaction but it’s the wrong target.”

“It seems to me that we’ve really got to look at and be realistic about what’s happening because if we don’t deal with the growth of mandatory spending…and look at the revenue side, we’re on a path where there’s really no way out,” Senator King said. “But to think that we can solve it entirely by revenues is unrealistic and to think that we can solve it entirely by cutting programs that are benefitting people who we have made commitments to is unrealistic.”

Senator King then immediately took the fight against sequestration to the Armed Services Committee where, during a hearing with the military service chiefs, he pointed out that sequestration was “expressly designed to be so stupid and unacceptable that Congress would never allow it to go into place.” Senator King then suggested that the Armed Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the part of the budget that bears the majority of sequestration’s effects, lead the Senate in finding a solution to the problem.

“And one of the reasons that it doesn’t make much sense is because we are focusing all our budgetary attention on a discretionary part of the budget. The growth in the budget right now is in mandatory programs…that’s what’s driving the federal deficit. It’s not defense. It’s not national parks. It’s not the Head Start program,” Senator King said. “…We really have to start talking about how to deal with it. And I hope, Mr. Chairman, that this Committee – which sees the effects of sequester more than any other committee in the Congress because more than half of it falls within our jurisdiction – can lead the way in trying to find some kind of solution that will make sense. Americans lives are being put at risk by this policy.”

Following Senator King’s questions in the Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), the Chairman of the Committee, thanked Senator King for his work to try to address the issue.

As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, and as a member of the Budget Conference Committee that devised the two-year budget compromise in 2013, Senator King has been a staunch proponent of finding a long-term deal that replaces sequestration with a plan that puts the United States on a sustainable path towards reduced debt and economic growth.

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