Sequester
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- The BCA – the legislation that created the sequester– instructs that half of the $85.3 billion be cut from non-defense programs and the other half from defense programs ($42.7 billion each).
- Both the defense and non-defense cuts are then allocated according to specifications detailed in the BCA among discretionary (or annually appropriated) and mandatory funding that is not explicitly exempted.
- OMB will then have to order agencies to reduce all non-exempt spending in each category across the board by the percentage necessary to achieve each of these amounts. Given that the reductions (with the exception of Medicare) will have to be achieved over only seven months, however, the effective percentage cuts will be even higher.
Defense Discretionary – $42.6 billion cut (≈13% effective cut over seven months / 7.8% annual cut)
- Subject to the sequester: Base (non-war) defense discretionary funding in the CR (extrapolated for the full fiscal year), war funding, unobligated balances from previous years, and some of the Hurricane Sandy aid.
- Exempt from the sequester: President Obama has announced that he will utilize his authority to exempt military personnel spending from the sequester.
- Special Rules: Pay for civilian defense employees is subject to the sequester, but there are specific restrictions on cutting annual pay, so the reductions must be taken in the form of attrition and/or furloughs. The Office of Personnel Management requires a minimum of 30 days notice before furloughs can occur.
- Almost every mandatory defense program is exempt, leaving less than $1 billion in this category subject to the sequester.
Non-Defense Discretionary – $26.4 billion cut (≈8% effective cut over seven months / 5.2% annual cut)
- Subject to the sequester: Base (non-war) non-defense discretionary funding in the CR (extrapolated for the full fiscal year), some war funding (largely for international affairs), most emergency and disaster aid (including that related to Hurricane Sandy), funding financed by offsets, program integrity funds, and advance appropriations from prior years.
- Exempt from the sequester: Major exemptions include Pell Grants and all non-administrative Veterans’ Affairs funding.
- Special Rules: Pay for federal government employees is subject to the sequester, but there are specific restrictions on cutting annual pay, so the reductions must be taken in the form of attrition and/or furloughs. The Office of Personnel Management requires a minimum of 30 days notice before furloughs can occur.
Non-Defense Mandatory – $16.3 billion cut (≈8% effective cut over seven months / 5.3% annual cut)
- Subject to the sequester: Most non-defense mandatory spending is exempt, but many programs such as farm subsidies, extended unemployment benefits, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children will be subject to the sequester.
- Exempt from the sequester: Social Security, retirement programs, veterans’ benefits, refundable tax credits (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit), Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), standard unemployment insurance, food stamps (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and a host of other programs (many of them benefitting individuals with low incomes) are all exempt from the sequester – see the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, starting on p. 22, for a list of all exempt programs.
- Special Rules: Medicare spending (excluding low-income and catastrophic subsidies for Part D and the qualifying individual program) is subject to the sequester, but the cut to Medicare providers and plans cannot exceed 2 percent, and Medicare beneficiaries will not face any direct cut. The sequester cuts to certain other mandatory health programs, such as Indian Health, are also capped at 2 percent.
SOURCE: Bipartisan Policy Center
In addition to the March 1 sequester, which stems from the failure of the super committee, there is a second sequester of defense discretionary funds scheduled for March 27 because in the CR for FY 2013, Congress appropriated roughly $13 billion above the BCA cap of $544 billion.**
Therefore, on March 27, absent explicit legislation mandating otherwise, defense discretionary funding will be effectively cut by an additional approximately 4.5 percent over the final six months of FY 2013 (or approximately 2.4 percent on an annual basis). If combined with the March 1 sequester, defense spending would face an across-the-board cut of roughly 18 percent from its current CR level (if assumed to be extended for the remainder of the year).
Setting aside the magnitude of the reductions, the most difficult aspect of both the defense and domestic cuts is that they will be made across the board to all non-exempt government spending regardless of programs’ merits or demerits.*** The reductions designed by law are executed at the Program, Project & Activity (PPA) level of the federal budget, sometimes defined in appropriations bills and which often includes very granular categories of expenditures, such as “two Virginia Class Submarines” or “salaries and benefits” of a particular agency.
Absent a new law passed by Congress, the president has little ability to spare one type of spending and cut more from another. This creates uncertainty in both the public and private sector because there remains much to be determined about how PPAs will be defined by agency administrators and how the cuts will be implemented. This inability to plan is already acting as a drag on economic growth.
Furthermore, the immediate and across the board nature of the cuts, along with their magnitude concentrated in a seven-month period, will impair economic growth as the year progresses. At BPC, we estimated last year that the sequester would reduce 2013 gross domestic product (GDP) growth by half a percentage point, and would cost the economy approximately one million jobs over the next two years. More recent estimates released by the CBO and Macroeconomic Advisors have roughly confirmed these projections.
Sequestration’s effect will be akin to that of a slow motion train wreck. The uncertainty has already impacted economic growth, and while there won’t be a sudden “cliff” that occurs on March 1, the ramifications will steadily worsen as time passes.
If sequestration remains in effect, then the BCA statutory spending caps for 2014 thru 2021 will be revised downward for both defense and non-defense discretionary spending.**** If that occurs, then by 2021 both domestic and defense discretionary spending will be at modern-era lows as a share of the economy. Finally, even after the aforementioned consequences and after nine years of these reductions, our debt-to-GDP ratio is only projected to reach 100 percent two years later (2033) than it would have absent sequestration – and that is a static estimate, meaning that it does not take into account the inevitable unexpected costs entailed by these types of cuts.***** The lesson from this exercise in formulistic budgeting, focusing debt and deficit reduction on portions of the federal budget that are not the major contributors to spending growth, is that we can expect much pain for little gain.
If sequestration remains in effect, then the BCA statutory spending caps for 2014 thru 2021 will be revised downward for both defense and non-defense discretionary spending.**** If that occurs, then by 2021 both domestic and defense discretionary spending will be at modern-era lows as a share of the economy. Finally, even after the aforementioned consequences and after nine years of these reductions, our debt-to-GDP ratio is only projected to reach 100 percent two years later (2033) than it would have absent sequestration – and that is a static estimate, meaning that it does not take into account the inevitable unexpected costs entailed by these types of cuts.***** The lesson from this exercise in formulistic budgeting, focusing debt and deficit reduction on portions of the federal budget that are not the major contributors to spending growth, is that we can expect much pain for little gain.
* To read more about how the alleviation of these cuts was “offset,” see the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s explanation in this post (#s 1 and 3).
** The defense discretionary cap for FY 2013 was lowered from $546 billion to $544 billion in the ATRA.
*** The traditional functions of reprogramming and transfer authority will provide the executive branch with a very limited capability to make adjustments to the sequester cuts. A forthcoming post will describe these tools in greater detail.
**** Those cuts will be $109.3 billion per year and will also be across the board to non-exempt mandatory spending programs, but for discretionary spending, as stated, the cuts will take the form of reduced defense and non-defense caps from the levels enacted in the Budget Control Act of 2011.
***** Even with the cuts from sequestration, debt held by the public is projected to remain high by historical standards, standing at 75 percent of GDP in 2021.
** The defense discretionary cap for FY 2013 was lowered from $546 billion to $544 billion in the ATRA.
*** The traditional functions of reprogramming and transfer authority will provide the executive branch with a very limited capability to make adjustments to the sequester cuts. A forthcoming post will describe these tools in greater detail.
**** Those cuts will be $109.3 billion per year and will also be across the board to non-exempt mandatory spending programs, but for discretionary spending, as stated, the cuts will take the form of reduced defense and non-defense caps from the levels enacted in the Budget Control Act of 2011.
***** Even with the cuts from sequestration, debt held by the public is projected to remain high by historical standards, standing at 75 percent of GDP in 2021.
SOURCE: Bipartisan Policy Center
How the Sequester Crosses the Color Line
How the Sequester Crosses the Color Line
The current budget crisis is just another example of an issue that hurts people of color.
(The Root) -- For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Voters have twice elected an African-American president, and Republicans have twice responded with obstinance -- by waging an intellectual civil war. Voter-suppression efforts were insufficient to deliver a Romney victory, but strategically gerrymandered districts guaranteed that Speaker John Boehner and his Republican-dominated House could continue to serve as the proverbial thorn in Obama's side.
The sequester measure -- first designed as a way to force both political parties to agree on a grand bargain of budget cuts and new revenues -- is now being used to stifle momentum gained from the president's re-election victory and effectively redirect the political discourse away from gun control and immigration reform and toward spending cuts and smaller government. As a result, billions in automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending took effect on March 1, after GOP members in Congress refused to negotiate on what economists are calling a "stupid" and "irresponsible" way to govern the world's largest economy. If unresolved, sequestration may cost upwards of 750,000 jobs and shave 1.25 percent off the nation's gross domestic product, making a double-dip recession all but certain.
Who will this affect the most? Black, brown, poor and working-class families still struggling to find work and wrestling with unresolved mortgage debts.
This is where the sequester crosses the color line.
African Americans remain disproportionately unemployed and underemployed -- at a rate of 13.2 percent, nearly double the 6.8 percent unemployment rate of their white counterparts. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the issue was hotly debated. Republicans saw it as a way to dissuade Obama's most loyal constituency, arguing that his economic policies had failed to benefit them. The GOP's aim was to breed apathy and discourage enough blacks from turning out to vote.
Democrats instead highlighted the steady drop in black unemployment -- from its recession high of 16.7 percent -- and reminded voters of the consequences of returning to Bush-era economic policies. But the truth is, the 2-to-1 disparity wasn't caused by George W. Bush or the Great Recession -- it has existed since 1972, the first year the data tracking began. The recession only exacerbated the problem.
Racial discrimination was traditionally considered the reason for such disparity, but researchers have found that the problems affecting African Americans have compounded. Systemic poverty, lack of educational opportunity and corporate glass ceilings have all worked in tandem to create a crippling cycle of lack and want. Discrimination, therefore, isn't the simple explanation it once was, and affirmative action is wholly insufficient to address the widening chasm. One disparity leads to another, and new barriers are created.
As Michael Fletcher pointed out in the Washington Post, blacks suffer most from weaker social networks -- lacking the right connections and facilitated access to job opportunity. In a nation whose explicit domestic policy had been to deny rights, benefits and access on the basis of race, a de facto affirmative advantage for whites emerged.
The result is that the racial gap exists regardless of educational achievement or occupation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobless rate for African-American college graduates was 7.1 percent in 2011, while the rate for whites was 3.9 percent. Whites with only a high school diploma had an unemployment rate of 8.4 percent, compared with 15.5 percent for blacks. And in construction jobs -- hardest hit by the mortgage crisis -- blacks endured a jobless rate of 30.4 percent, compared with 15.3 percent for whites.
The deep public-sector cuts still being demanded by Republicans will only make the problem worse. University of California, Berkeley's Labor Center (pdf) found that 21.2 percent of all African-American workers in 2008 were public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblack workers. And by mid-2012 a total of 636,000 state and local jobs had been cut, according to a report by the Department of Commerce. Obama's American Jobs Act was intended, in part, to halt the bleeding -- but House Republicans refused to even bring AJA to a vote.
Without that stimulus, 27 weeks of unemployment became 52 weeks. And underemployment has long been the Achilles' heel for black labor. Once unemployed, African Americans are less likely to find jobs, and they stay unemployed much longer. In 2011, blacks experienced a median duration of unemployment of 27 weeks, compared with 19.7 weeks for whites and 18.5 weeks for Hispanics.
As periods of unemployment extend, gaining viable employment becomes more difficult. Applicants may lack the resources, connections and income support to even pursue opportunities. And employers often consider credit scores and last date of employment as screens for job candidates, placing an added burden on those already at a disadvantage.
The Center for American Progress finds that sequestration will disproportionately affect communities of color and deepen underemployment. From cuts in extended unemployment benefits, workforce-development programs and educational programs like Head Start, blacks will feel the pinch more firmly.
For those whose families rely on programs like WIC -- designed to aid children and mothers -- $543 million could be lost, affecting the 450,000 people of color on assistance. Likewise, since 2010, $2.5 billion has been cut from housing-assistance programs like Section 8, which aids the poor and elderly. Data from 2008 showed that 44 percent of those recipients were black.
Though political operatives on both the left and right agree that America's military budget is bloated, the defense cuts as outlined in the sequester will disproportionally affect minorities, since defense jobs largely involve government workers. The looming cuts of $85 billion in this budget year alone will fall mainly at the state level, constricting public-sector employment even more.
This is President Obama's catch-22: trying to deliver on campaign promises to his most loyal supporters while fielding a Republican opposition indifferent to his constituency. As the GOP fights to protect tax loopholes for the wealthiest, the black and brown voters the party lost in the last election suffer as a kind of quiet retribution. And as the systemic nature of unemployment, underemployment and discrimination creates a 21st-century underclass, neither political party has the courage to discuss the issue in black and white.
Edward Wyckoff Williams is a contributing editor at The Root. He is a columnist and political analyst, appearing on Al-Jazeera, MSNBC, ABC, CBS Washington and national syndicated radio. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
How the Sequester Crosses the Color Line
The current budget crisis is just another example of an issue that hurts people of color.
(The Root) -- For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Voters have twice elected an African-American president, and Republicans have twice responded with obstinance -- by waging an intellectual civil war. Voter-suppression efforts were insufficient to deliver a Romney victory, but strategically gerrymandered districts guaranteed that Speaker John Boehner and his Republican-dominated House could continue to serve as the proverbial thorn in Obama's side.
The sequester measure -- first designed as a way to force both political parties to agree on a grand bargain of budget cuts and new revenues -- is now being used to stifle momentum gained from the president's re-election victory and effectively redirect the political discourse away from gun control and immigration reform and toward spending cuts and smaller government. As a result, billions in automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending took effect on March 1, after GOP members in Congress refused to negotiate on what economists are calling a "stupid" and "irresponsible" way to govern the world's largest economy. If unresolved, sequestration may cost upwards of 750,000 jobs and shave 1.25 percent off the nation's gross domestic product, making a double-dip recession all but certain.
Who will this affect the most? Black, brown, poor and working-class families still struggling to find work and wrestling with unresolved mortgage debts.
This is where the sequester crosses the color line.
African Americans remain disproportionately unemployed and underemployed -- at a rate of 13.2 percent, nearly double the 6.8 percent unemployment rate of their white counterparts. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the issue was hotly debated. Republicans saw it as a way to dissuade Obama's most loyal constituency, arguing that his economic policies had failed to benefit them. The GOP's aim was to breed apathy and discourage enough blacks from turning out to vote.
Democrats instead highlighted the steady drop in black unemployment -- from its recession high of 16.7 percent -- and reminded voters of the consequences of returning to Bush-era economic policies. But the truth is, the 2-to-1 disparity wasn't caused by George W. Bush or the Great Recession -- it has existed since 1972, the first year the data tracking began. The recession only exacerbated the problem.
Racial discrimination was traditionally considered the reason for such disparity, but researchers have found that the problems affecting African Americans have compounded. Systemic poverty, lack of educational opportunity and corporate glass ceilings have all worked in tandem to create a crippling cycle of lack and want. Discrimination, therefore, isn't the simple explanation it once was, and affirmative action is wholly insufficient to address the widening chasm. One disparity leads to another, and new barriers are created.
As Michael Fletcher pointed out in the Washington Post, blacks suffer most from weaker social networks -- lacking the right connections and facilitated access to job opportunity. In a nation whose explicit domestic policy had been to deny rights, benefits and access on the basis of race, a de facto affirmative advantage for whites emerged.
The result is that the racial gap exists regardless of educational achievement or occupation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobless rate for African-American college graduates was 7.1 percent in 2011, while the rate for whites was 3.9 percent. Whites with only a high school diploma had an unemployment rate of 8.4 percent, compared with 15.5 percent for blacks. And in construction jobs -- hardest hit by the mortgage crisis -- blacks endured a jobless rate of 30.4 percent, compared with 15.3 percent for whites.
The deep public-sector cuts still being demanded by Republicans will only make the problem worse. University of California, Berkeley's Labor Center (pdf) found that 21.2 percent of all African-American workers in 2008 were public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblack workers. And by mid-2012 a total of 636,000 state and local jobs had been cut, according to a report by the Department of Commerce. Obama's American Jobs Act was intended, in part, to halt the bleeding -- but House Republicans refused to even bring AJA to a vote.
Without that stimulus, 27 weeks of unemployment became 52 weeks. And underemployment has long been the Achilles' heel for black labor. Once unemployed, African Americans are less likely to find jobs, and they stay unemployed much longer. In 2011, blacks experienced a median duration of unemployment of 27 weeks, compared with 19.7 weeks for whites and 18.5 weeks for Hispanics.
As periods of unemployment extend, gaining viable employment becomes more difficult. Applicants may lack the resources, connections and income support to even pursue opportunities. And employers often consider credit scores and last date of employment as screens for job candidates, placing an added burden on those already at a disadvantage.
The Center for American Progress finds that sequestration will disproportionately affect communities of color and deepen underemployment. From cuts in extended unemployment benefits, workforce-development programs and educational programs like Head Start, blacks will feel the pinch more firmly.
For those whose families rely on programs like WIC -- designed to aid children and mothers -- $543 million could be lost, affecting the 450,000 people of color on assistance. Likewise, since 2010, $2.5 billion has been cut from housing-assistance programs like Section 8, which aids the poor and elderly. Data from 2008 showed that 44 percent of those recipients were black.
Though political operatives on both the left and right agree that America's military budget is bloated, the defense cuts as outlined in the sequester will disproportionally affect minorities, since defense jobs largely involve government workers. The looming cuts of $85 billion in this budget year alone will fall mainly at the state level, constricting public-sector employment even more.
This is President Obama's catch-22: trying to deliver on campaign promises to his most loyal supporters while fielding a Republican opposition indifferent to his constituency. As the GOP fights to protect tax loopholes for the wealthiest, the black and brown voters the party lost in the last election suffer as a kind of quiet retribution. And as the systemic nature of unemployment, underemployment and discrimination creates a 21st-century underclass, neither political party has the courage to discuss the issue in black and white.
Edward Wyckoff Williams is a contributing editor at The Root. He is a columnist and political analyst, appearing on Al-Jazeera, MSNBC, ABC, CBS Washington and national syndicated radio. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
How liberals unwittingly won the sequester
How liberals unwittingly won the sequester
Conservatives learned to love the $85 billion in federal spending cuts. But liberals arguably got the better deal
By Peter Weber
6:45am EST
Remember the sequester? If you're not a federal employee, the odds are that the $85 billion in spending cuts this year — and about $1 trillion over 10 years — aren't at the front of your mind.
The Washington Post recently looked at 48 of the dire predictions from the White House about the effects of budget sequestration — a legislative trigger never meant to be pulled. Only 11 have come true, The Post found, while 24 did not and 13 are up in the air. "The dog barked," Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition tells The Washington Post. "But it didn't bite" — at least not yet.
If you work for the federal government, however, there's a decent chance the sequester is very real. Some 125,000 employees at the EPA, Housing and Urban Development, IRS, and other federal agencies have been furloughed, and on Monday, 650,000 civilian Defense Department workers joined them. The Pentagon employees will take 11 unpaid days off, or one day a week through September — when the next set of cuts hit.
Many conservatives have come to tolerate, even celebrate, the sequester as a crude way to shrink the government. Many liberals, on the other hand, are frustrated that people aren't seeing the hidden damage of the cuts. Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress runs through some of them:
And those 650,000 Defense Department employees will feel the pain, too, says Laura Clawson at Daily Kos. "A 20 percent pay cut over three months is going to be, for most workers, more than can be made up for by just not saving or by cutting the obvious luxuries," she says. "A 20 percent pay cut hurts."
There is real damage being done by the cuts, especially the "genuine tragedy" of kids losing access to Head Start, says Matthew Yglesias at Slate. But the liberal kvetching about the sequester — and the conservatives "crowing that these doomsday scenarios haven't come to pass" — just shows how weird the politics are, says Yglesias. After all, "sequestration mostly cuts things that liberals think should be cut," and by a wide margin.
http://theweek.com/article/index/246565/how-liberals-unwittingly-won-the-sequester
How liberals unwittingly won the sequester
Conservatives learned to love the $85 billion in federal spending cuts. But liberals arguably got the better deal
By Peter Weber
6:45am EST
Remember the sequester? If you're not a federal employee, the odds are that the $85 billion in spending cuts this year — and about $1 trillion over 10 years — aren't at the front of your mind.
The Washington Post recently looked at 48 of the dire predictions from the White House about the effects of budget sequestration — a legislative trigger never meant to be pulled. Only 11 have come true, The Post found, while 24 did not and 13 are up in the air. "The dog barked," Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition tells The Washington Post. "But it didn't bite" — at least not yet.
If you work for the federal government, however, there's a decent chance the sequester is very real. Some 125,000 employees at the EPA, Housing and Urban Development, IRS, and other federal agencies have been furloughed, and on Monday, 650,000 civilian Defense Department workers joined them. The Pentagon employees will take 11 unpaid days off, or one day a week through September — when the next set of cuts hit.
Many conservatives have come to tolerate, even celebrate, the sequester as a crude way to shrink the government. Many liberals, on the other hand, are frustrated that people aren't seeing the hidden damage of the cuts. Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress runs through some of them:
Low-income preschoolers are being kicked out of their Head Start programs and 70,000 are projected to lose access as a result of sequestration, while schools on military bases and Native American reservations are experiencing debilitating cuts. Domestic violence shelters are reducing services and beds, warning that more women are likely to be killed by their partners because they can't access the help they need. Meals on Wheels programs, which help feed the home-bound elderly, have had to drastically reduce the number of meals they can deliver. [ThinkProgress]
And those 650,000 Defense Department employees will feel the pain, too, says Laura Clawson at Daily Kos. "A 20 percent pay cut over three months is going to be, for most workers, more than can be made up for by just not saving or by cutting the obvious luxuries," she says. "A 20 percent pay cut hurts."
There is real damage being done by the cuts, especially the "genuine tragedy" of kids losing access to Head Start, says Matthew Yglesias at Slate. But the liberal kvetching about the sequester — and the conservatives "crowing that these doomsday scenarios haven't come to pass" — just shows how weird the politics are, says Yglesias. After all, "sequestration mostly cuts things that liberals think should be cut," and by a wide margin.
Recall that sequestration exempted from cuts Social Security, Medicaid, and most means-tested anti-poverty programs. It also cut equally from the military and non-military sides of the budget. But since the military is responsible for less than half of all federal discretionary spending, that means military spending took a bigger hit than any category of non-military spending. Then on the non-military side, Medicare benefits were left intact but Medicare provider payments were cut....
So you have a broad cut in government spending that mostly comes out of the government's various "guys with guns and uniforms" undertakings with some of the rest coming in the form of reduced profits for America's bloated health care industry. The fact that you can cut a lot of this spending without detriment to the welfare of the American people is exactly what liberals have been saying about these programs for years. [Slate]
So you have a broad cut in government spending that mostly comes out of the government's various "guys with guns and uniforms" undertakings with some of the rest coming in the form of reduced profits for America's bloated health care industry. The fact that you can cut a lot of this spending without detriment to the welfare of the American people is exactly what liberals have been saying about these programs for years. [Slate]
http://theweek.com/article/index/246565/how-liberals-unwittingly-won-the-sequester
Re: How liberals unwittingly won the sequester
The Sequester's Devastating Impact
on America's Poor
It's fashionable in political circles to say the mandatory
budgets cuts haven't been the predicted disaster. But
cuts to programs like Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or
federal unemployment benefits suggest otherwise and
their recipients have suffered as the cuts kicked in.
The Atlantic
July 13, 2013
The Sequester's Devastating Impact
on America's Poor
It's fashionable in political circles to say the mandatory
budgets cuts haven't been the predicted disaster. But
cuts to programs like Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or
federal unemployment benefits suggest otherwise and
their recipients have suffered as the cuts kicked in.
The Atlantic
July 13, 2013
The federal government's across-the-board sequestration cuts, which began taking effect in March, may seem like an overhyped piece of political theater--that is, unless you're an unemployed adult living in Michigan. There, roughly 82,000 people, like Kristina Feldotte of Saginaw, have watched their federal unemployment checks dwindle by 10.7 percent since late March. That's as much as a $150 per month from payments that, at most, clock in at $1,440.
"It flabbergasts me that our government can't get its crap together," says Feldotte, 47, a mother of four and a laid-off public-school teacher. "With the air-traffic controllers, Congress fixed that right away because it affected the planes going in and out of Washington. But they're not doing anything that benefits the people."
That's especially true of poor people since Congress and the White House failed to reach a deal to undo the cuts in March. Air-traffic controllers and meat inspectors, represented by powerful unions and lobbyists, got reprieves. Agencies such as the Justice and Homeland Security departments found wiggle room in their budgets to stave off furloughs. But programs outside of D.C. for low-income or distressed people -- such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or federal unemployment benefits -- have suffered as the cuts kicked in, leading to cancellations, fewer meals, smaller checks, and staff layoffs.
"The impacts of the sequester have been hard to document, but it really is a diminution of services," says Sharon Parrott, vice president for budget policy and economic opportunity at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Take the Meals on Wheels program in Contra Costa County, California, which, like the national program, has had to cut 5.1 percent of its budget. After losing $89,000 in federal funding over a six-month period, the program had to scale back the number of meals it serves from 1,500 to 1,300 a day. This puts its director in the unenviable position of having to choose which low-income or lonely 80-year-olds are less deserving of a meal delivery. "We're only adding new clients in the direst circumstances -- like they will die or be institutionalized if we don't get to them," says Paul Kraintz, director of the county's nutrition program.
The Head Start program in Rockland County, N.Y., had to make similarly tough choices. It managed to keep open its summer program for the youngest children, ages 1 to 3, but had to cancel the summer sessions for 3-to-5-year-olds and lay off 12 staff members to save roughly $240,000, says Ouida Foster Toutebon, executive director of Head Start Rockland. Like the national program, it will lose about 5 percent of its budget -- in this case, $414,925 -- by the end of the fiscal year, September 30. "The parents were upset, because they needed to make other arrangements," Toutebon says.
This was not the way sequestration was meant to go. The reductions were designed to be so painful -- to both defense and nondefense discretionary programs -- that Republicans and Democrats would flock to the negotiating table to find a compromise. Instead, the effects of sequestration have been uneven, with small pockets of intense upheaval rather than widespread but mild disruptions. Now, many Republicans openly profess their love of the cuts, especially since the fiscal-cliff deal did not seriously slash government spending or tweak entitlement programs, as the GOP had hoped it would. In their view, sequestration turned into the next best option for shrinking the federal government.
Democrats did manage to safeguard programs for the absolute neediest Americans. The sequester exempts a long list of safety-net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare benefits, and Social Security. But Democrats have not been able to protect cornerstone social programs such as Meals on Wheels or Head Start, nor have they been able to prod Republicans to undo the cuts -- especially now that the White House's many dire projections have yet to come true. Border Patrol agents did not get furloughed, airplanes were not grounded, and the mass layoff of teachers did not occur.
"I think people look at what the impacts will be with a grain of salt now," says Barry Anderson, a former official with the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget who was involved in crafting sequestration legislation in the 1990s. "A 5 percent cut just wasn't the end of the world that some people thought it would be." Yet, in addition to the cuts to low-income programs, the Defense Department started to furlough 650,000 civilian employees this week. The IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, OMB, and others have also begun furloughs.
If the cuts have not been felt equally, it's because many agencies found extra money in contingency accounts or ways to cuts costs without reducing their head counts. But that's not true of programs like Head Start and grant-recipients like Meals on Wheels that already run on shoestring budgets. Further, many federal workers (who had a median salary of $73,000 last year) are better equipped to absorb the financial shock of (at most) 11 furlough days than are government dependents who rely on weekly unemployment checks or struggle to find their next meal.
The story gets even more complicated next fiscal year. Appropriators will devise their own implementation, and they needn't make across-the-board cuts as long as they remove equal sums from defense and nondefense programs and stay under caps laid out in the Budget Control Act. Senate Democrats want to use this discretion to undo the sequester, while Republicans want to cut more discretionary spending and bolster defense.
Yet again, the two parties are on a budgetary collision course scheduled to erupt this fall. Until a broader -- and more politically powerful -- group of people feels the effects, legislators may never marshal the political will to tweak or change the cuts.
"It flabbergasts me that our government can't get its crap together," says Feldotte, 47, a mother of four and a laid-off public-school teacher. "With the air-traffic controllers, Congress fixed that right away because it affected the planes going in and out of Washington. But they're not doing anything that benefits the people."
That's especially true of poor people since Congress and the White House failed to reach a deal to undo the cuts in March. Air-traffic controllers and meat inspectors, represented by powerful unions and lobbyists, got reprieves. Agencies such as the Justice and Homeland Security departments found wiggle room in their budgets to stave off furloughs. But programs outside of D.C. for low-income or distressed people -- such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or federal unemployment benefits -- have suffered as the cuts kicked in, leading to cancellations, fewer meals, smaller checks, and staff layoffs.
"The impacts of the sequester have been hard to document, but it really is a diminution of services," says Sharon Parrott, vice president for budget policy and economic opportunity at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Take the Meals on Wheels program in Contra Costa County, California, which, like the national program, has had to cut 5.1 percent of its budget. After losing $89,000 in federal funding over a six-month period, the program had to scale back the number of meals it serves from 1,500 to 1,300 a day. This puts its director in the unenviable position of having to choose which low-income or lonely 80-year-olds are less deserving of a meal delivery. "We're only adding new clients in the direst circumstances -- like they will die or be institutionalized if we don't get to them," says Paul Kraintz, director of the county's nutrition program.
The Head Start program in Rockland County, N.Y., had to make similarly tough choices. It managed to keep open its summer program for the youngest children, ages 1 to 3, but had to cancel the summer sessions for 3-to-5-year-olds and lay off 12 staff members to save roughly $240,000, says Ouida Foster Toutebon, executive director of Head Start Rockland. Like the national program, it will lose about 5 percent of its budget -- in this case, $414,925 -- by the end of the fiscal year, September 30. "The parents were upset, because they needed to make other arrangements," Toutebon says.
This was not the way sequestration was meant to go. The reductions were designed to be so painful -- to both defense and nondefense discretionary programs -- that Republicans and Democrats would flock to the negotiating table to find a compromise. Instead, the effects of sequestration have been uneven, with small pockets of intense upheaval rather than widespread but mild disruptions. Now, many Republicans openly profess their love of the cuts, especially since the fiscal-cliff deal did not seriously slash government spending or tweak entitlement programs, as the GOP had hoped it would. In their view, sequestration turned into the next best option for shrinking the federal government.
Democrats did manage to safeguard programs for the absolute neediest Americans. The sequester exempts a long list of safety-net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare benefits, and Social Security. But Democrats have not been able to protect cornerstone social programs such as Meals on Wheels or Head Start, nor have they been able to prod Republicans to undo the cuts -- especially now that the White House's many dire projections have yet to come true. Border Patrol agents did not get furloughed, airplanes were not grounded, and the mass layoff of teachers did not occur.
"I think people look at what the impacts will be with a grain of salt now," says Barry Anderson, a former official with the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget who was involved in crafting sequestration legislation in the 1990s. "A 5 percent cut just wasn't the end of the world that some people thought it would be." Yet, in addition to the cuts to low-income programs, the Defense Department started to furlough 650,000 civilian employees this week. The IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, OMB, and others have also begun furloughs.
If the cuts have not been felt equally, it's because many agencies found extra money in contingency accounts or ways to cuts costs without reducing their head counts. But that's not true of programs like Head Start and grant-recipients like Meals on Wheels that already run on shoestring budgets. Further, many federal workers (who had a median salary of $73,000 last year) are better equipped to absorb the financial shock of (at most) 11 furlough days than are government dependents who rely on weekly unemployment checks or struggle to find their next meal.
The story gets even more complicated next fiscal year. Appropriators will devise their own implementation, and they needn't make across-the-board cuts as long as they remove equal sums from defense and nondefense programs and stay under caps laid out in the Budget Control Act. Senate Democrats want to use this discretion to undo the sequester, while Republicans want to cut more discretionary spending and bolster defense.
Yet again, the two parties are on a budgetary collision course scheduled to erupt this fall. Until a broader -- and more politically powerful -- group of people feels the effects, legislators may never marshal the political will to tweak or change the cuts.
