Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said today that the Pentagon is trying to ease the impact on as many as 800,000 civilian employees, cutting the number of unpaid furlough days by a third. Hagel credits a new spending bill signed by President Obama. It gives the Defense Department more flexibility to deal with billions of dollars of across-the-board cuts that began on March 1st.
At a news conference this afternoon, however, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey said that the Pentagon is still being forced to make difficult choices.
GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman: On Monday, we will be halfway through the fiscal year, and we will be 80 percent spent in our operating funds. We don't yet have a satisfactory solution to that shortfall. And we're doing everything we can to stretch our readiness out.
To do this, we will have to trade at some level and to some degree our future readiness for current operations. It will cost us more eventually in both money and time to recover in the years to come. We will be trying to recover lost readiness at the same time that we're trying to reshape the force. We can do it, but that's the uncomfortable truth.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Despite the Defense Department's efforts to mitigate the impact of sequestration on the nation's military readiness, the across-the-board budget cuts are already starting to take a toll in communities where federal spending is the backbone of the local economy.
That's true of southeastern Virginia.
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