WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Navy's top civilian leader is worried.
Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that a return to sequestration would be "devastating."
"This would knock us down, flat down," he said. "If you look at what sequestration does, it's a $26 billion cut to the Department of the Navy. We must have consistent funding. Any breaking in that consistency will have dire effects on the process and progress that we have made to date."
Sequester-level budget caps are scheduled to return next October first with the beginning of Fiscal Year 2020.
They would bring about $90 billion in cuts overall, $54 billion in cuts to the Department of Defense.
The arbitrary, across-the-board budget reductions will automatically kick in unless a Democrat-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate vote to lift the statutory budget caps with the enactment of a new law, and President Trump signs it.
"If we were forced back to a sequestration level, it would be more than the Blue Angels not doing air shows, and people not going to conferences," said General Robert Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corps. "It would be units getting ready to deploy later. It would cause us to look at our force structure, And make us a smaller force."
Vice Admiral Bill Moran, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations is also concerned.
"We lose proficiency, we lose expertise," he said. " We have to recover expertise by skipping generations of people who miss the opportunity during the time when we didn't have the resources available."
The last time sequestration was on the table, in 2013, Old Dominion University estimated it could pull $1.45 billion from the Hampton Roads economy and cause more than 28,000 jobs to be lost locally over three years.
Sen Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) offered guarded optimism.
"I don't think it's going to happen, but it's in the statue," he said. "Unless we take action, bipartisan action to give our citizens the security they need, it's in the statue."
► Make it easy to keep up to date with more stories like this. Download the 13News Now App.