Defense industry suppliers lobby bicameral budget committee on sequester

The House-Senate budget committee is the new target for the defense industry as it looks for a way to get rid of sequestration.

Defense industry suppliers delivered a letter from the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) to the leaders of the bicameral budget committee on Friday, urging the panel to reverse the sequester as part of a budget deal.

Joe Murphy, chairman of the Ferco Aerospace Group, and Gregory Bloom, president of Seal Science, Inc., delivered the letters to the offices of the House and Senate Budget Committee leaders, who are heading up the bicameral panel tasked with striking a budget deal that meets for the first time next week.

“We’re here to tell Congress to decouple the conversation of sequestration from national security,” Bloom said in a statement.

{mosads}The letter was written by the leaders of AIA, the trade association that’s led the defense industry’s unsuccessful fight to stop sequestration.

“As you seek bipartisan solutions to resolve our debt and deficit problems, we implore you to end sequestration,” wrote Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush, AIA’s Chairman; L-3 CEO Mike Strianese, AIA’s vice chairman; and AIA CEO Marion Blakey.

“Its impact on the industrial base and national supply chain has eroded our ability, not only to create new jobs, but to maintain our current intellectual human capital,” they said.

Both parties have expressed an interest in reversing sequester, but they have yet to find an agreement about how they would replace the automatic budget cuts. The harm sequester is having on the military and defense industry has so far been unable to convince Congress to strike a deal that would avert the cuts.