Pentagon Comptroller Hale ‘Hopeful’ For Sequestration ‘Micro-Deal’

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/11/pentagon-comptroller-hale-hopeful-for-sequestration-micro-deal/



Pentagon Comptroller Hale ‘Hopeful’ For Sequestration ‘Micro-Deal’
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on November 14, 2013 at 5:02 PM

WASHINGTON: As the House and Senate budget committees confer behind closed doors, the Pentagon’s top budgeteer says that even though he doesn’t know what’s going on he still has hope.

“I’ve got my fingers crossed,” Robert Hale, the Defense Department comptroller, told the Defense One conference here this afternoon. “I remain at least cautiously optimistic that we’ll see some kind of micro-deal.”

What’s the best case that Hale can convince himself is possible? It’s not full funding as requested in the president’s budget, he said, but some kind of stopgap relief from the automatic spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, often referred to as sequestration. His best hope, Hale said, is “that we get at least a two-year deal, I could even hope for maybe a five-year one…and not at the BCA cap levels, at somewhat higher levels, offset however Congress and the President can agree to.”

~snip~

Hale acknowledged, it was “in hindsight, perfect hindsight” a mistake not to plan for sequestration. “A year ago, I bet Gen. [Martin] Dempsey a good bottle of scotch that they’d never do sequestration,” Hale said ruefully. “Scotch is expensive.”