[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 1792]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         AVERTING SEQUESTRATION

  (Mrs. BUSTOS asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mrs. BUSTOS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak out today against the 
automatic cuts known as sequestration which are set to kick in days 
from right now. These cuts were designed to be so painful and so 
terrible that they would never see the light of day. This is budgetary 
insanity. That is why I have opposed sequestration from the start.
  Earlier today, I met with the Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce and 
representatives from the Rock Island Arsenal. Last week, I met with a 
defense contractor from Rockford, Illinois, and I toured the USDA 
Research Lab in Peoria, Illinois. That's the place where they figured 
out how to mass produce penicillin, and these are the kinds of programs 
that are at risk. These programs are rightly worried about the impact 
of sequestration.
  We will see job losses because of this flawed budget process, and it 
will have a trickle-down effect throughout the region that I represent. 
Our residents will have less money to eat out. They'll have less money 
to see a movie or to shop at our small businesses. We cannot afford to 
have this happen.
  I introduced my first piece of legislation a couple of weeks ago, the 
Government Waste Reduction Act. It is a bipartisan, commonsense 
approach to reduce government waste and not impact the middle class. 
This type of approach is reasonable, responsible, and rational, and 
that's what I would call for in a bipartisan fashion.

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