From the Denver Post:
The law on layoffs by defense contractors seems pretty straightforward.
The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires advance notice of impending layoffs.
While
the letter of the law may be clear, the politics surrounding it have
become unfortunately complicated by a heated presidential campaign.
The
Obama administration must stop its meddling in an effort to restrain
potentially unfavorable defense contractor layoff news just before the
presidential election.
The catalyst for this episode is the so-called fiscal cliff — the automatic federal budget cuts scheduled to begin Jan. 2.
It's important to note the automatic cuts were cemented into law by the inability of a bipartisan congressional committee to come to terms on a deficit reduction plan.
So, here it comes — $500 billion in defense cuts and another $500 billion in reductions to domestic programs....
Here is the Obama administration meddling part: On Sept. 28, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued guidance,
urging contractors not to send the notices and saying the government
would cover the cost of defense layoffs if they happened as a result of
sequestration.
In essence, the administration was attempting to
keep an election-eve flood of worrisome notices from being dumped on
states heavily dependent on defense contracting, such as Virginia.
That's wrong.
Republicans,
understandably, were outraged, but Democrats should be as well. And we
all should be disgusted by lawmakers so paralyzed by ideology that
they cannot compromise in the name of the nation's fiscal future.
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