 Hello, shipmates. I'd like to update you on some events that have taken place here in Washington, D.C. Now, remember, I want you to focus on warfighting first, operating forward, and being ready. But I need to update you on the budget. There's some good news this week. We had the President sign his the Continuing Resolution Extension. Now, that gives the federal government funding for the remainder of this fiscal year. And it also provides the Department of Defense a spending bill for the remainder of this fiscal year. That's good news. In January, whenever negotiations failed at there in the Congress to reconcile our Budget Control Act, we were faced with a $9 billion shortfall on a $49 billion need. So you do the simple math there. We had a 20% reduction in what we were going to need for our operations. So money was going to be tight, and we all felt that ratcheting down of spending over the last couple of months. Now, because we have a spending bill, that shortfall, that $9 billion shortfall has been cut in half. So we still have a little bit of a shortfall in operations and also in our investments accounts due to sequestration. But we're in much better shape. So what's next? Well, we're going to move ahead in a very deliberate fashion and decide what's important and make sure we fund those most important things. Number one, we have some bills to pay. They're called reimbursables. Utilities, payroll, contracts that we have leased. We'll make sure that those are taken care of. Number two, our Global Force Management Allocation Plan. The operations that many of you are performing out there in the fleet for this fiscal year 13, we need to restore the important operations and we'll walk through that in a very, like I said, deliberate manner coordinating with our global combatant commanders. Number three, we need to look ahead to fiscal year 14 and make sure that you're getting the training that you need and we're doing the maintenance that we need to make sure that those operations next year are prepared and you're ready to operate forward out there and making sure that war fighting is first. And then lastly, we need to do the base operations support out there. We need to do those kind of restoration and modernization projects out in our buildings to make sure that they get done. The safety, the security, fire safety, make sure Port Ops is right, make sure that our airfields are right, and we'll do that. So for the next couple of weeks, we here in Washington will be coordinating with your leadership out there in the fleet to do the right thing with the money that we have. Okay, so what does this mean to you? For our sailors out there, what it means is your pay will be stable as it has been. Our manpower accounts have been stable throughout this whole turmoil that we've gone through and they will remain the same. We're going to retain our family readiness programs as they have been. PCS will remain stable throughout all of this, so moves should continue at pace. Tuition assistance is still at 100% and I'm working to keep it that level. I think that's where we need to be. For our civilian shipmates, I want to thank you for your patience, for your dedication throughout this period of time. As you may know, our furloughs are being reduced from 22 days to 14 days. And the Secretary of the Navy and I are going to work with the Department of Defense staff through this process to keep that furlough as low as feasible. We'll work through that. So we're going to operationalize where we're going out there. We're going to do the priority operations in fiscal year 13. We're going to do the maintenance necessary to prepare for operations in fiscal year 14. I want to thank you all for being patient, for your continued dedication throughout this period, and most importantly, for the service that our sailors and our civilians working together provide this Department of the Navy. Thanks for your service and I'll see you out there in the fleet.