Maine Reps tell Congressional leaders funding will help keep workers on the job at BIW

Representatives Chellie Pingree and Mike Michaud are pushing Congressional leaders to make sure a spending bill that Congress will soon take up will include funding for shipbuilding at Bath Iron Works. After Congress passed an overall budget bill last month, Congressional leaders are now deciding exactly how the money in that budget should be spent, and Pingree and Michaud are asking that $100 million be put toward a contract to build DDG-51 destroyers at Bath Iron Works (BIW). The Pentagon hassigned a multi-year deal to build 10 DDG-51s, with the work evenly divided between BIW and a shipyard in Mississippi. However, sequester cuts have left the tenth ship in that contract at risk, with the Navy coming up $100 million short in construction funds. Pingree and Michaud want to help eliminate that shortfall in the upcoming spending bill to make sure the ship is built, and is built at BIW.

In a letter to the top Congressional leaders on the committee that will be writing the spending bill, Pingree and Michaud wrote:

"The DDG-51 is a workhorse of the fleet and restoring the funding for the tenth ship in the multiyear procurement program is essential to making sure that workers at the yards building these ships stay on the job and we maintain the industrial shipbuilding capacity that is critical to maintaining the Navy's readiness," the pair wrote.

Spending limits for most of the federal government will be determined in the coming weeks, when Congress finalizes a $1 trillion "omnibus" spending bill.