We wish all a Happy New Year in 2021, as we complete this Holiday Season of what has been a very challenging year, with COVID-19 that began in China year ago and has taken so many lives. The continuing “social distancing” that overlayed the rigors of a national election still accompanies unsettled but needed outcomes.
Recent congressional actions illustrate consequences of those difficulties. The congressional funding for next year (and the rest of Fiscal Year 2021) remains uncertain as congress completed its session on New Year’s Day, after passing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021—the NDAA(21)—over President Trump’s veto.
Note, Fiscal Year 2021 actually began on October 1, 2020; so the NDAA(21) finally establishes the policy for the current Fiscal Year now a quarter of a calendar year over. But it does not provide associated funding.
For that, we await more Congressional actions, most likely to pass a multi-trillion-dollar bloated omnibus Appropriations Bill to provide needed funding along with a lot of pork. And even that result may await the results of the next week’s Senate runoff election in Georgia and will require the president’s signature..
This congressional performance—or lack thereof—makes planning for the future difficult, to say the least. In particular, that delay has frustrated our efforts to protect the electric power grid against electromagnetic pulse (EMP)—an existential threat to all Americans.
But at least we now can, and will, work with the finally approved NDAA(21) policy for the rest of Fiscal Year 2021 toward embedding a serious National Guard initiative addressing the existential EMP Threat.
We will continue to seek Federal funding from those sworn under the Constitution to “provide for the common defense” for the next steps with our Lake Wylie Pilot Study. We seek to validate our estimate that the York County Distribution Grid can be protected for less than $100 per York County citizen and to develop a plan extending that effort throughout South and North Carolina and to the rest of the nation. Click here for a brief discussion and video backing up our claims for such an affordable plan.
On that hopeful note, we wish you all a Happy New Year!
“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
Where there is error, may we bring truth.
Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.
And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”
~ Saint Francis of Assisi
E-Mail Message 210101
