Washington, D.C.—Following President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Congressman Mike Turner, Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, released the following statement:
“Despite the fact that there is wide, bipartisan agreement that sequestration is devastating to our Defense Department, tonight, in his State of the Union Address, the President failed to mention it. All of the Joint Chiefs have testified before the House Armed Services Committee that if the President’s sequestration continues in 2016, our military will come to a grinding halt.
Sequestration will affect mission readiness and our deployed personnel around the globe, while having deep impacts to vital national security installations like Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, and the corresponding civilian jobs within our southwest Ohio community and across the country.
Tonight, I had hoped the President would put forth a plan to reverse the devastating effects of this harmful policy to provide our Servicemembers with the support, funding and certainty they need. Instead, he ignored the issue of sequestration all together.
National security is a constitutional responsibility and the President's failure to address sequestration in tonight’s speech is a a significant and meaningful omission.”
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