Scott C. Donnelly
Analyst · Jeff Sprague with Vertical Research
Yes, Jeff, I mean it really is something at this point that you can't plan for, because the fundamental flaw, in my view of sequestration, is it's just bad policy. If people decide that there needs to be a further reduction in the defense budget and obviously, the defense community doesn't like that idea. But even if you are going to take it down, the issue is you surely would never do it in the fashion it's laid out in the sequestration law, right, where you do a -- spread it across everything, every program, every spending item, everything gets hit by a common percent. I mean first of all, it would be a disaster for the government because that means every contract, every worker, everything out there gets impacted, which is going to result in a massive deluge of contract changes, requests for equitable adjustments. I mean it would cost the government more money than they would ever say. I mean there's actually contracts. You can't just go out there and arbitrarily change contracts without having ramifications of that. Just from a pure administration standpoint, you would never do that. The other course is if you're going to take more money out, and I'm not betting against, by the way, that they're going to take more money out. I think that there still could be, when they work their way through, I'd be very surprised if it's a lame-duck process -- session. But when you get into a new Congress and they actually start to figure out what they got to cut and what they're going to do about the deficits, that there could still be a further allocation of cuts to defense. But I think you have to let that go work the way it normally does, just like the first $0.5 billion of defense is already taken, where you go to the Pentagon, you go to Congress, okay, we're going to take up this much money. And there's actually a thoughtful rational way about what programs get hit, what programs don't get hit and you proceed down that path. So I think I wouldn't be very surprised if sequestration gets invoked just because of inaction in our political process. That wouldn't surprise me a whole lot at this stage of the game. But I think once that hits, there will be some emergency sessions and people will actually say, "Okay, if we're going to cut money, here's how we have to do it." And the problem with planning for that is you don't know what programs they're going to go try to take money out. So I don't think it's going to be an across-the-board deal. I think that's an administrative -- it's bad policy. Administratively it's bad. It's bad for defense. But knowing where the cuts ultimately will come at this point would be absolute guesswork, and I just don't think we can -- we're wasting our time to even try and to do so -- a plan for that.