Sen. Kaine: Eliminating sequester ‘unrealistic’

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in a new interview that Congress won’t be able to completely eliminate sequestration.

Kaine, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made the comment in an interview with The Loudoun Times-Mirror this week.

“We’re not going to be able to eliminate the sequester; we tried it in the spring, and we couldn’t get the votes. So we’re trying to reduce it as much as possible,” he said.

Sequestration budget caps that resulted from the Budget Control Act of 2011 are set to return in fiscal 2016, which begins in October. If Congress appropriates more than those limits, automatic spending cuts will return.

{mosads}Kaine, who represents a state full of defense contractors and firms affected by the sequester, suggested relieving the lower budget caps might be possible.

The budget deal reached by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the heads of the House and Senate Budget committees, eased the sequester for fiscal 2014 and 2015, which lasts through September 2015. 

“It’s unrealistic to think we can do better in limiting the sequester in 2016-2017. I wish we could, but even the Pentagon guys and some of the people in the NIH [National Institutes of Health] have said to me, ‘If you can get what you got in 2014-2015 in 2016-2017, we’ll consider that a win,’ ” Kaine said.

If half of the sequester is lifted, Kaine said “that would be a win.”

“But the other half of the sequester, we ought to be giving the administration flexibility to not do it across the board,” he added.

Now that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is expected to take the Senate Armed Services Committee gavel in the new Congress, Kaine suggested there might be a better chance of making sequester relief a priority. 

“McCain is completely against the sequester. It was one thing when we had a Democratic chair who was against it — all the Democrats were against it,” Kaine said. “But to have a Republican chair who is outspoken and strong against the sequester, who has the credentials in military issues, who is going to challenge him?”