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| Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, accompanied by White House press secretary Jay Carney, briefs reporters on the sequester, Monday, Feb. 25, 2013, at the White House in Washington. |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Who'll be the first to feel the sting?
Jobless
Americans who have been out of work for a long time and local
governments that are paying off loans to fix roads and schools are in
tough spots when it comes to the automatic federal budget cuts that are
scheduled to kick in Friday.
About 2 million
long-term unemployed people could see checks now averaging $300 a week
reduced by about $30. There could also be reductions in federal payments
that subsidize clean energy, school construction and state and local
public works projects. Low-income Americans seeking heating assistance
or housing or other aid might encounter longer waits.
Government employees could get furlough notices as early as next week, though cuts in their work hours won't occur until April.
The
timing of the "sequester" spending cuts has real consequences for
Americans, but it also has a political ramifications. How quickly and
fiercely the public feels the cuts could determine whether President
Barack Obama and lawmakers seek to replace them with a different deficit
reduction plan.
Eager to put pressure on
Republican lawmakers to accept his blend of targeted cuts and tax
increases Obama has been highlighting the impact of the automatic cuts
in grim terms. He did it again on Monday, declaring the threat of the
cuts is already harming the national economy.
Republicans
say he is exaggerating and point to rates of spending, even after the
cuts, that would be higher than in 2008 when adjusted for inflation. All
Obama has to do to avoid the damage, House Speaker John Boehner said at
the Capitol, is agree to the GOP's recommended spending cuts - with no
tax increases.
By all accounts, most of the
pain of the $85 billion in spending reductions to this year's federal
budget would be slow in coming. The dire consequences that Obama
officials say Americans will encounter - from airport delays and
weakened borders to reduced parks programs and shuttered meatpacking
plants - would unfold over time as furloughs kick in and agencies begin
to adjust to their spending reductions.
"These
impacts will not all be felt on day one," Obama acknowledged in a
meeting with governors at the White House on Monday. "But rest assured
the uncertainty is already having an effect."
Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned that the federal government
would be unable to "maintain the same level of security at all places
around the country" once the automatic cuts began to take effect.
The public will feel the results "in the next few weeks," she said, and "it will keep growing."
The
majority of the federal budget is in fact walled off from the cuts.
Social Security and veterans' programs are exempt, and cuts to Medicare
are generally limited to a 2 percent, $10 billion reduction in payments
to hospitals and doctors. Most programs that help the poor, like
Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized school lunches, Pell Grants and
supplemental security income payments are also exempt.
Still,
the Pentagon will feel the brunt of half the cuts. Pay for active
military is off-limits for cuts, so the rest of the defense budget must
absorb the hit. The Obama administration says defense contractors have
already ramped down work, contributing to a dip in economic activity in
the fourth quarter of last year. The Navy has decided not to deploy an
aircraft carrier as planned to the Persian Gulf.
Elsewhere,
the White House's budget office says long-term unemployed Americans
would lose an average of more than $400 in benefits over the year. The
cuts do not affect state unemployment benefits, which jobless workers
typically get soon after their loss of work. The federal reductions
could begin immediately, though some analysts say the government could
delay them for a short period to avoid a harmful hit on the economy.
Bill
Hoagland, a former top Republican Senate budget aide and now senior
vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank,
said the administration must be "betwixt and between" when it comes to
addressing reductions in programs like jobless aid.
"They
want to make sure the American public knows this sequester is a bad
thing, but they also don't want to disrupt the economy too much," he
said. "It's not that the reductions won't take place. But they could
delay the impact of that until later in the year."
Administration
officials also say the Treasury Department is prepared to begin
reducing subsidies that cover interest payments by state and local
governments on public works, school and renewable energy projects. That
means those governments will have to find money in their budgets to make
up the difference in bond interest payments, and while that might not
affect projects already under way, it could delay new construction
efforts.
The sequester, says Douglas Rice of
the Center on Budget and Policy priorities, also would mean that
families that leave subsidized housing would be less likely to be
replaced with people from waiting lists, and that eventually some
families could lose their apartments.
Many
federal programs, like heating aid for the poor, already have many more
people seeking assistance than the program budgets can cover. Funding
for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, for instance, has
fluctuated greatly in recent years, with the administration proposing to
cut it by 13 percent this year. In such cases, it may be impossible for
people denied aid to know whether it's because of the sequester since
they might have been denied help anyway.
In
some instances the cuts will be felt not by beneficiaries being thrown
out of programs but by longer delays to get help. In the case of
subsidized housing, for example, there are already long waits for
assistance in most of the country.
In the case
of the Women, Infants and Children program for low-income pregnant
women and their children, the government has generally tried to make
sure that every eligible woman can get food aid. States aren't permitted
to cut the food benefit, which means fewer people will be served. The
Agriculture Department says it will prioritize things so that pregnant
women and nursing mothers keep their aid but post-partum women who do
not breastfeed could lose their aid.
Who gets
hit first also depends on how the government's budget flows. Education
aid to school districts, for instance, is delivered in the fall, so
impacts won't be felt until the new school year. But some teachers are
already being informed that they could lose their jobs in August or
September. Most Head Start programs won't feel cuts until the upcoming
school year, too.
Some programs, like
subsidized child care for the poor, are run by states, which will have
flexibility in how to allocate the cuts. Just one in six eligible
low-income families benefits from a federally funded child care slot.
Cuts to the program leave states with difficult options: reduce the
number of children cared for, require poor families to contribute more
or cut payments to providers.
"I don't think
people are going to feel it as dramatically as the administration has
been suggesting," said Hoagland. "I'm not questioning the
administration's numbers, I'm questioning their timing."
