Organizations representing Maryland’s federal installations and businesses expressed relief after a two-year budget deal was struck in Congress last week. The deal will lift spending caps previously approved by Congress and raise the federal government debt limit.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun,

“To know that there’s a budget deal and that we have that behind us … is for a lot of us a feeling of relief,” said Jill McClune, president of the Army Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for Aberdeen Proving Ground and counts many contractors among its members.

The article further describes the components of the deal.

The package lifts caps on the appropriated spending passed by Congress by $50 billion in 2016 and $30 billion in 2017, evenly divided between defense and domestic spending. Another $16 billion or so would come each year in the form of inflated war spending, evenly split between the Defense and State departments.

The agreement also raises the government debt limit through March 2017, removing the threat of an unprecedented national default on Nov. 3.

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The two-year agreement would avert a looming shortfall in the Social Security disability trust fund that threatened to slash benefits, and head off an unprecedented increase in Medicare premiums for outpatient care for about 15 million beneficiaries.

Cuts include curbs on Medicare payments for outpatient services provided by certain hospitals and an extension of a 2-percentage-point cut in Medicare payments to doctors through the end of a 10-year budget. There’s also a drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and savings reaped from a Justice Department fund for crime victims that involves assets seized from criminals.

For more information, read the full Baltimore Sun article.

To combat the effects of federal sequestration, business leaders in the Washington region are urging government officials to compete less and work collaboratively to create jobs and grow the area’s economy.  As reported by the Washington Post,

A historic slowdown in federal spending — caused largely by the mandated budget cuts known as sequestration — has taken a bite of $11 billion a year in government contracts out of the area’s economy and forced local companies to scramble to respond.

It has also prompted local business and civic leaders to push state and local governments to compete less with one another for jobs, investment and sports teams. They are urging politicians instead to collaborate in areas such as training workers, marketing the region and, above all, improving transportation.

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The goal is to nudge the region to compete more effectively with rival metropolitan areas such as Silicon Valley and Boston. The concern is that without such change, the Washington area risks becoming an economic laggard.

To carry out this goal, business and civic leaders have formed a group to “produce a post-sequestration “Road Map” for the region’s economy.

The 2030 Group, led by ­Maryland developer Robert E. Buchanan, organized the effort. It has hired George Mason University economist Stephen S. Fuller to study how to aid seven key local industries, including information technology and bio-health services, that have high growth potential. The group plans to release its results by October.

The eventual goal is one or more “regional summits” to agree on a strategy for “diversifying the region’s economy based on its unique competitive position . . . as the capital of the world’s largest economy,” according to the Road Map’s research proposal.