Sequestration

Floor Speech

Mr. REID. Let's talk about sequestration just for a brief time. I talked about it yesterday in the afternoon when the Senate convened. On Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration implemented sequester furloughs. It will affect tens of thousands of employees. By Monday, yesterday, travelers were already experiencing delays at airports from coast to coast.

According to the Wall Street Journal, flights to New York airports were delayed more than an hour already because of those furloughs. Delays are also reported in Los Angeles and even Baltimore. The FAA assured us things will get much worse before the end of the busy summer travel season, as these arbitrary sequester cuts continue to affect airport staffing levels.

What this means is that every 2 weeks all FAA employees will have to take a day off. At peak travel times, almost 7,000 flights will be delayed every day, some of them by up to 3 hours. On the worst day we had last year because of weather-related issues, less than 3,000 flights were delayed. Now, every day, more than twice that number will be delayed.

These delays will be bad for business, they will be frustrating for families, and they will be devastating for the economy. But flight delays are not the only unintended consequence of these across-the-board cuts. It is not just FAA employees. It will affect 750,000 jobs across the country. It will shred the safety net that keeps millions of seniors, children, veterans, and needy families from falling through the cracks.

It will gut investment in education, medical research that helps America compete in the 21st century. More than 2,700 schools with large numbers of disadvantaged children will see their Federal funding slashed. Seventy thousand little boys and girls will not be able to do the Head Start programs. These cuts will put 10,000 classroom jobs at risk. They will eliminate extra help at closing the achievement gap for 1.2 million underprivileged students.

More than 7,200 teachers and classroom aids who work with children with disabilities will lose their jobs because of the sequester. Some 33,000 college students will lose their work study jobs. I was a janitor for part of the time I went to school. It helped me pay my tuition. Things have changed over the years, but these jobs are still important, very important. They call them work study jobs.

We are putting the dream of higher education further out of reach for our poorest students if we keep this sequestration going. Families and businesses in every State will feel the pain of the sequester whether they fly or do not fly. But Congress could act now to reverse these cuts without adding a single dollar to the deficit. We can use the savings from wrapping up military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid the full brunt of these arbitrary cuts.

Right now, there is about $650 billion in that fund. We could erase the sequester for the rest of the year, which is a fraction of the savings from winding down these two wars. Using those savings, Congress could avert the most painful and senseless sequester cuts, cuts to the FAA and programs that get homeless veterans off the streets, fund research to cure lethal diseases, and provide meals to needy seniors.

I only hope public outcry over long delays at airports will serve as a wake-up call to my Republican colleagues. We cannot put off action any longer.

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