Off the heels of the Fiscal Cliff budget crisis, lawmakers failed to reach a compromise on $85 billion in automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense, domestic and mandatory spending, better known as “Sequestration.”
Created as a ploy to force congress to agree on a budget proposal, the sequester was enacted after a congressional supercommittee failed to find a solution on reducing the deficit by nearly $1.2 trillion.
Thus, sequestration, a 2.4 percent decrease in federal spending was activated by Congress in conjunction with the Obama administration.
Originally proposed to take effect on Jan. 1 of this year, sequestration was prolonged by two months through the last-minute fiscal cliff deal to buy time for legislators to come to a compromise on spending and taxation.
While President Barack Obama once supported the sequester solution, in recent months, he has back-tracked his position calling the cuts a “meat cleaver approach” to reducing the deficit. The White House outlined 12 examples in which the sequester would negatively impact Louisiana, including work-study jobs, Head Start, teachers and schools.
According to the White House, sequestration would eliminate Head Start and Early Head Start services for approximately 1,400 children in Louisiana alone. The administration also states that more than 500 fewer low income Louisiana students would gain access to financial aid along with more than 100 fewer federal work-study jobs available.
Head Start Executive Director Dr. Susan Spring said the $26 billion in domestic spending would have quite an impact on Southeastern’s early education program.
“On Friday we were told we will be cut by five percent,” said Spring.  “This equals about $700,000 for us. Rather than cut child slots, we plan to cut the number of service days to children.  This also will mean furlough days for all 500 employees,  at this point, probably 12 days next year.”
Spring went on to say that lost funds because of spending cuts could only be remedied through “donations from the private sector or local governments.”
In the weeks leading up to the budget crunch, the White House and congressional democrats called on house republicans and house leadership to act on the matter, demanding the sequester be replaced using a “balanced approach,” including up to $92 billion in new tax revenues and as much as $29 billion in spending cuts.
However, after agreeing to a fiscal cliff deal which raised $41 in new tax revenues for every $1 in spending cuts, house republicans refused to budge on their proposal passed in the 112th congress which would have replaced the sequester with $218 billion in cuts to domestic spending.
During a senate vote to substitute the sequester with higher tax revenues and dispersed spending cuts, Sen. Mary Landrieu, broke with Democratic Party leadership, voting against the proposal along with conservative Sen. David Vitter.
Landrieu also objected to a republican proposal which would have granted the Office of Management and Budget further suppleness in how to execute the $85 billion in cuts while Vitter voted in favor of the measure.
Ultimately, both plans fell short of votes needed, leaving them to fail in the senate, prolonging deadlock in Washington and leading to activation of sequestration. Furthermore, though Pell Grants are exempt from sequestration, other federally funded programs such as Upward Bound are not, wreaking havoc on program directors.
The sequester is set to hit the Upward Bound Program by reducing federal funds by 5.1 percent according to Director Ron Abel. The program will also be forced to act more exclusively according to Abel, who claimed the number of students being served will be lowered due to the $85 billion in cuts.
As Inside Higher Ed reported, universities and higher education lobbyists pleaded with lawmakers months before sequestration to strike a deal, explaining how the cuts would slash grants and research development. Republicans quickly discarded the claims saying the reduction would only set funds back to previous year levels. Prior to the cuts taking effect, the Wall Street Journal reported that there was more than meets the eye when it came to the President’s power to moderate sequestration.
As Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal writes, “Programs, projects and activities are a technical category of the federal budget, but the sequester actually occurs at the roughly 1,200 broader units known as budget accounts.” This, according to The Journal, gives the administration discretion as to how the cuts can be implemented.
“Before slashing cancer research, stop funding the $130-million-a-year National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine that studies herbs and yoga,” writes Moore, calling on the administration to proportionately mitigate the cuts. “Cut after-school funding only after consolidating the 105 federal programs meant to encourage kids to take math and science classes.”
The Hill also called attention to the White House’s authority, reporting that according to budget experts, the administration has the flexibility to delay cuts for months through apportionment, along with defining “program, project and activity,” in due course allowing the White House to decide what receives the axe.
Moreover, a report by Forbes revealed that so-called “spending cuts” may not be cuts at all.
After assessing the Congressional Budget Office’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023,” Forbes reported that “After inflation adjustments and exempting more than a trillion dollars of defense and non-defense discretionary spending from the sequester, the CBO projects discretionary spending to increase by $110 billion over the decade.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Spring rejected the analysis saying, “Yes, we are being cut after years of minimal to no increases. We have not had a significant increase in about 10 years.”
Critics of the Obama administration and lawmakers have not been mute during the financial budget dispute. Former Louisiana representative, Jeff Landry, blamed all of Washington, specifically President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, for what he called “senseless across-the-board reductions.”
“The truth is that the federal government is going to spend $15 billion more this year than last,” said Landry in a post on The Hayride blog. “That is not a cut. There are no real cuts. It’s like bragging about your new diet while gaining weight.”
Dr. Susan Spring summarized the sequester concept as a means in which lawmakers and the administration fail to act as their offices require.
“In my opinion it gives the impression that they aren’t doing their job,” said Spring.
In true Washington style, as one crisis concludes, another emerges. In less than four weeks, oppositional lawmakers will spar off with the White House once again as an arrangement must be negotiated in order to fund the federal government past March 27.