Any catastrophes from the sequester yet?

Great Debates
1

Four months ago, something called “the sequester” took place. In case anyone has forgotten, it was an across-the-board cut to discretionary federal spending, the result of a budget deal in August of 2011. Democrats generally predicted the results of such budget cuts with words such as “devastation”, “catastrophe”, and “disaster”. Some of our locals chimed in with predictions such as “Now multiply this by the number of federal workers in this region [D.C.], and what you have is an economic disaster. Our restaurants will close. Our entrepreneurs will fail. Our service workers will lose their jobs. The things that keep this city moving will stop working.” On the Republican side, some predicted that things would be just fine post-sequester, though others fretted that our military power would be hollowed out. And among libertarians, there was general agreement that the human race could survive a very small reduction in government spending.

A month after it took place, I started a thread in which I noted that the promised devastation didn’t look like it had arrived. A few posted links to supposedly awful sequester-related stuff, but by reading those links in full, we found the claims to be greatly exaggerated. A different line of attack was taken by some, who said that the true effects of the cuts hadn’t been felt yet, but would be soon. “Virtually all of the actual cuts haven’t actually begun yet. FAA control towers shut down over the next month or so. DOD civilians begin furloughs in June.” Well, April has come and gone. So have May and June. I still don’t see the promised catastrophes.

As it happens, the Washington Post, which was beating the “sequester=disaster” drums hard in February and March, published an article today entitled Budget mayhem that wasn’t, concluding what conservative and libertarian publications predicted months earlier. “Sequester milder than forecast … it has not produced what the Obama Administration predicted: widespread breakdowns in crucial government services.” The Post investigated 48 specific claims about what would happen after the sequester. Only 11 proved true, while 24 proved false. (In a wonderful big government touch, 13 agencies couldn’t tell whether the disaster occurred or not.)

The basic facts as documented by the Post seem pretty much in line with what I said in that thread from April. There’s a huge amount of waste throughout the federal budget. Hence, when the budget got cut, there was no need to cut anything important. Instead, Congress or the executive branch could simply shift money from the wasteful uses to more legitimate ones.

The Justice Department, for instance, cut more than $300 million in money that had been allocated to the department in past years but wasn’t spent. When those years ended, the money expired; without Congress’s permission, it couldn’t be spend on anything new. So, instead of saving money by furloughing FBI agents and prsion guards, the department lost only what it wasn’t free to spend anyway.
…
At the FAA, Congress found a similarly painless cut. Congress prevented the furloughs by taking $253 million from the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program, which gives grants to airports (among the long-time recipients: Lake Murray State Airport in Oklahoma, which was eligible for $150,000 per year despite averaging one takeoff and landing per week.) The grantees that were entitled to this money had already told the government that they didn’t need it.

And so forth. The entire government budget is packed with big sums of money that accomplish nothing. The not-so-bad sequester demonstrates that the government can fulfill all of its duties just fine even after taking a budget cut. I say we should immediately introduce even more cuts. For instance, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is one agency that has actually furloughed employees. In the past few years, HUD has spend money on hiring belly dancers, settling sexual harassment claims, vast piles of supplies that never get used, huge salaries for convicted felons with no credentials, expensive mansions in Florida, and other things that taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund. Break out the ax and let’s cut some more.

2

It hasn’t had any impact upon presidential travel…$100 million for the trip to Africa. This is what I don’t understand-if every government agency was cut 1% per year, you could balance the budget. But that will never happen, because budgets ALWAYS increase (even as less and less is actually done).

3

How do you figure?

4

I don’t think you understand the import of your block quote, much less the rest of the Washington Post reporting, if you think it vindicates your position. You do understand that the $300 million was not actually cut, right? You understand that the sequester did not affect whether that money was spent?

Since you didn’t link to it, the story is here.

5

25%, right (about)? Estimated expenditures this year are 3.8 trillion. Estimated deficit is 901 billion. 901 billion is about 23% of 3.8 trillion. We’ve got a deficit problem, and a debt problem but simple stuff like “just shave 1% off of everything” isn’t going to solve it.

6

It’s simple. If you cut 100 government programs by 1% each, you’ve just reduced the federal budget by 100%.

This is basic math, people!

7

Sure, Congress stepped in and passed a law allowing the FAA more flexibility to move funds not to force towers to close. That’s an argument for government making targeted cuts and against relying on across-the-board cuts to balance the budget. If you go back and read what I wrote in several posts, since you specifically quoted me – I repeatedly say that the really stupid part of sequester is the part about across-the-board cuts.

Looking through those impacts, a number of them estimate what would have happened if Congress froze all spending at 2012 levels and then instituted a sequester on top of that. When funding is frozen at prior levels, program-by-program adjustments are not possible, so too much money is available for some programs, and not enough for others. Some of the “not felt” examples were predicted before Congress passed an appropriations bill to fix those budget problems, meaning the “double whammy” of sequester based off inaccurate budget numbers just didn’t happen.

Let me ask you something: is it important to have 17 squadrons of Air Force aircraft ready to deploy?

But let me ask you this: if making large cuts to government programs is really the answer, why hasn’t austerity worked out better for Europe?

And by the way, have you noticed that CBO has lowered its estimates for the deficit this year by more than $200 billion? Not based on budget cuts, but “mostly as a result of higher-than-expected revenues and an increase in payments to the Treasury by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

8

As the Washington Post said, Congress mitigated some of the cuts. People were definitely starting to feel the FAA cuts, but Congress stepped in and allowed some changes so the FAA wouldn’t inconvenience the public (and Congress). Quite a few people in the DOD are being furloughed for 11 days through September. That will be a hardship for quite a few people, so it’s not like nothing happened. It’s just that Congress wimped out on their hard stand for some cuts and the public probably doesn’t care about a bunch of government workers getting furloughed. If you left it up to each agency’s discretion or their parent agency as to what to cut, they could more easily do it, but then maybe a Congress critter’s favorite program would be cut, plus it wouldn’t force the government to get smaller like a lot of Tea Party members in Congress want to do.

9

There are definitely a lot of sub-optimal situations. For example, I know of a department of education grant program that can no longer afford yearly site visits to monitor their grant recipients. They are able hire local contracters to do a very basic evaluation, but the kind of learning that comes from a full grant monitoring process is being lost. Contractors can measure if they money is being spent appropriately, but there isn’t funding to answer larger questions like “How effective are grants for this sort of program?” and “is there quantitative evidence that this type of grant improves outcomes?” Nothing is falling apart, but nobody is getting the full return on the investment.

A lot of examples are quite similar. Programs are still running, but they are not running as well as they could be. I can think of at least one program that is meant to attract top graduate school grads into federal service on leadership tracks- it’s extremely selective and offers quite a deal of prestige despite paying graduates basic federal salaries (which works out to a good deal for agencies doing the hiring). Unfortunately, the implementation of the program this year has been much messier and slower than previous years, and the face-to-face hiring process has been hurriedly replaced with things like online chat interviews. As a result, many of these grads are getting offers from the private sector, and the government is losing out on what is usually a chance to attract top talent. It’s probably not going to have an immediate effect, but if it is sustained it will lead to less effective agencies in the long run.

My understanding is that most federal agencies still don’t know the full impact of the sequester, and this is making planning difficult. They can still manage most of their work on a daily basis, but their hands are tied when it comes to innovation and improvement because they have no way of knowing what resources are going to be there several months from now.

10

I know a friend of mine who did emergency and contingency planning for DoD got laid off when the sequester made the government cancel the contract. Given that the work involved assessing and planning how the military could still function if some emergency disrupted the government, I’ve got to think that that sort of thing would be good for the military to know.

11

Advantaged people are less likely to notice cutbacks that affect the disadvantaged.

[QUOTE=http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2013/06/24/67706/kicking-low-income-americans-while-theyre-down/]
140,000 low-income Americans who stand to lose their housing vouchers, the 70,000 children who stand to be kicked out of Head Start, and the many seniors who will have to adjust to 4 million fewer meals delivered by Meals on Wheels.
…
… [the Community Development Block Grant] funding figure of $1.6 billion is more than 40 percent lower than the level at which the program was funded in 1975 under President Gerald Ford, according to Politico. This doesn’t even account for the fact that had the 1975 allocation of $2.7 billion simply kept pace with inflation, the corresponding funding level for FY 2013 would have easily been more than $11 billion. To add insult to injury, the House of Representatives will consider legislation that will alleviate the $54 billion sequestration cuts to defense spending in FY 2014 by shifting $54 billion of those cuts to domestic programs such as the CDBG.
[/QUOTE]

Note that much of the CDBG funding is for capital investments like construction or install handicapped-accessible sidewalks. Much of the sequestered spending will be for capital investment, whose nature is that its lack will become visible only gradually.

I wish I understood nutrition so I could come up with the best analogy. Government continuing for a while without proper funding relates to a body with too much/too little glucose – OK in the short term.

A Washington Post article also mentions
[ul][li] defendants in federal courts get less speedy trials because public defenders have been furloughed,[/li][li] National parks are reducing services,[/li][li] Many Medicare patients are losing services,[/li][li] Many unemployed have reduced benefits.[/li][/ul]

A big question is What would economic growth have been without the sequester? But there may be no clear answer. Most economists would agree that government spending cuts are bad for growth; if the economy grows anyway, does that mean most economists are wrong? Or, more likely, that the economy could have grown even faster? The Federal Reserve’s unprecedented monetary expansion clouds cause-effect understanding even more.

12

Maybe it’s just the crowd I run with (early 30-somethings), but this one has been pretty major among people I know.

13

We do? Last I checked we had an employment problem, and the deficit is on the way towards dealing with itself - most of it can be attributed to the depressed economy anyways.

14

We have both? A country can have more than one problem at a time. We spend more than we take in, and that’s problematic if it continues over a long period of time. And our high unemployment and generally bad economy is helping to contribute to that, by decreasing government revenues and increasing expenditures.

15

One of the reasons the sequester is silly is that it doesn’t cut enough. Both sides are guilty of covering this point up.

As mentioned upthread, this year’s deficit sits at $901B. Well and (not) good.

However, non-defense discretionary spending - which is what is largely discussed about ‘budget cuts’ - sits at an estimated $624B.

Or, to rephrase, enough if ALL spending that wasn’t interest, security or entitlements was cut another ~$280B would need to be cut from somewhere. And cutting that much would make the next set of elections…problematic…for a number of people. So that won’t be happening.

In short, those pushing for the sequester aren’t actually asking for sufficient cuts to deal with the problem. Which doesn’t mean the other side is, either, but they’re not presenting themselves at attempting to deal with the federal budget problem.

16

Err… No, we really don’t have a debt or a deficit problem. Yes, the numbers look big, but shrieking about “900 BILLION” may very well be missing the finer details - like that if the economy was at full output, the actual deficit would be lower than the yearly GDP increase. Or that interest rates are still very low and are predicted to stay that way. Or that lowering the deficit while in a liquidity trap with high long-term unemployment while interest rates remain depressed is a terrible idea.

17

Don’t use that phrase in Arizona. The U.S. Forest Service’s Fire and Aviation Management Budget was cut by 5% this year, and 500 firefighters lost their jobs.

19 of those that weren’t fired are now dead.

18

Would they be alive if not for the sequester?

If so, do you have any proof of this claim?

19

Use a little common sense here, Debaser.

If you face more fire (because of our terrible droughts) with fewer firefighters, you have two options. Let the fires destroy more, or assign fewer resources to each fire. In practice, the Forest Service has done a little of both. Prioritizing fires to some extent, but also assigning fewer resources to those priorities.

So the question is just whether having longer hours and fewer resources increases the risk to firefighters. Do you really doubt that proposition?

20

You are doing an admirable job of moving the goalposts, but that’s not what was being claimed.