BUDGET CUTS FEBRUARY 8, 2013
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The White House today, at long last, released a fact sheet outlining what sort of cuts we can expect in domestic discretionary spending if the automatic budget cuts (“the sequester”) are permitted to take effect on March 1. What the hell took so long?
Three days ago Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn reported that the White House had instructed three separate cabinet agencies that they weren’t allowed to talk about pending budget cuts unless they cleared their remarks first with the White House budget office. That so infuriated Senate Appropriations chair Barbara Mikulski, D.-Md., that she scheduled a Feb. 14 hearing on the impact of the non-defense cuts (even though an Appropriations subcommittee already held a similar hearing last summer, and released a report on sequestration’s likely impact on non-defense jobs and services). Mikulski also told Politico that the White House was putting its own cabinet agencies under a “gag order.” That seems to have been the prod that the White House needed.
But why did the White House need to be prodded at all? Except for the Pentagon, which has been free to mau-mau Congress all it wants with lurid details about how the sequester would diminish U.S. defense capabilities, the domestic cabinet agencies have lately been silent about sequestration’s looming impact. Apparently the White House was worried that whatever the cabinet agencies said might conflict with calculations made by the Office of Management and Budget, which has issued three reports on sequestration’s likely impact, most recently in August 2012.
Perhaps the White House was concerned that government agencies, when left to their own devices, might exaggerate, for the purposes of self-protection, the harmful effects of proposed budget cuts. My mentor and journalistic guru, Charles Peters, founder of the Washington Monthly, has identified this as the “fireman first principle.” Here’s how he describes the gambit it in his 1980 book, How Washington Really Works:
[W]hen faced with a budget cut, the bureaucrat translates it into bad news for members of Congress who are powerful enough to restore the amount eliminated. In other words, he chops where it will hurt constituents the most, not the least. At the local government level, this is most often done by threatening reductions in fire and police protection…. The bureaucrat will almost always say that a budget cut is sure to result in the loss of jobs. The directly threatened employees will then write their congressman, who will almost certainly vote to restore the funds….
But when Charlie wrote this passage he wasn’t contemplating cuts of the magnitude embodied in the sequester—$1.2 trillion over 10 years, which translates into immediate domestic discretionary cuts of 9 percent. (The defense cuts would be 13 percent.) Nor was he contemplating that these cuts would be made during a recovery as fragile as the one we have today. Cuts in spending by the Pentagon and state and local governments already caused the economy to contract during the last quarter of 2012. “A cut of these dimensions is going to be harmful to the economy,” Charlie told me, and calculating the extent of the sequester’s effects is going to be especially difficult.
If the economy contracts a second time during the present quarter, the U.S. economy will be back in recession. Perhaps naively, when the news about last quarter’s contraction came out I concluded that the Republicans would quickly agree to cancel (or at least postpone) the sequester. They don’t want a recession, do they? Since Obama’s a lame duck, then couldn’t even capitalize on it to deny him another term. But the current Republican strategy appears to be: We don’t care if we cause a recession. We just want to cut the hell out of government spending. Even if it means cutting the hell out of defense spending.
I still don’t believe Republicans will be able to pursue for very long a strategy to cut Pentagon spending by 13 percent in 2013 and 8 percent thereafter. But I’m impressed by how long they’ve held their ground. The Wall Street Journal editorial page talks a good game when it calls this “The Unscary Sequester.” The sequester, it says, “will help the economy by leaving more capital for private investment.” The Journal, at least in this instance, rejects what Paul Krugman calls “weaponized Keynesianism,” i.e., the idea that defense spending, and only defense spending, can stimulate a weakened economy. But even the Journal concedes that the cuts are “troublesome” with respect to national security.
But you want to know what the impact of those domestic cuts will be. Here’s what the White House is now predicting: 70,000 kids dropped from Head Start, up to 2,100 fewer food inspections, up to 373,000 “seriously mentally ill” people untreated, more than a thousand FBI agents let go, about a thousand fewer criminal cases prosecuted (as hundreds of prosecutors are furloughed), a thousand fewer research grants from the National Science Foundation (affecting 12,000 scientists), about 1,200 fewer workplace inspections, four million fewer Meals on Wheels for senior citizens, cuts in emergency unemployment compensation of up to 9.4 percent….
And, oh, one more. Cuts in FEMA grants that help state and local governments employ, yes, firefighters. This time I think it may actually be true.
7 comments
Sequestration will bring modest defense cuts, if any. Having signaled that America is threatened by enemies everywhere, justifying drone attacks resulting in large numbers of "collateral damage", how is Obama to defend defense cuts. He can't, and he won't. I believe the expression is hoist by one's own petard.
- rayward
February 8, 2013 at 6:13pm
*****“fireman first principle.”**** I notice that when they cut the IRS budget, contact with the general public goes first so the public will notice the cuts.
- Nusholtz
February 8, 2013 at 7:43pm
I don't understand your point, Ray. Part of the White House argument on drones is that they can be seen as -- so far, at least -- a cost-effective and relatively non-consequential tool that saves vast amounts of money and American lives that a military intervention would involve. And, indeed, have drone attacks resulted in large amounts of collateral damage? That assumption seems at least a bit risky. The point somewhere down the line, however, is that almost everyone recognizes that some kind of Pentagon trimming is in order. Despite a broad consensus, this is still anathema to some (mainly GOP but not all) and fighting the sequester does guarantee some credibility for resisting more modest cuts later.
- ironyroad
February 8, 2013 at 9:28pm
If one believes that Iran is seeking to diminish sectarian strife by meeting with Morsi, by all means let's cut defense. If one believes, as I do, that Iran is seeking to foment war (with its support of Hamas, a Sunni organization) between Israel and the Sunni nations that surround Israel to weaken Israel and, more importantly, to weaken the Sunnis (who most certainly would lose the war), then let's not start spending the peace dividend quite yet. America's confusion about the sectarian division in the region, a product of divided governments (and ignorance), and obsession with national boundaries rather than sectarian boundaries, is being rectified, as national boundaries and sectarian boundaries are finally becoming aligned. And once they are, distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys will be no less daunting but at least we will have nation states to arm or to invade, making matters much simpler for the interventionists. Which side will the interventionists choose to arm: the Sunnis, who daily inflict death and mayhem on our friends the Israelis but who supply much of our oil and allow us to build military bases, or the Shia, who include our "friend" and "ally" Iraq but also our "enemy" Iran. I'd be inclined to choose the Sunnis, if for no other reason than the practical reason that they comprise about 85% of Muslims, but explaining that to our friends the Israelis and the families of the victims of 9/11 and of the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be easy. I suppose the best we can hope for is one big sectarian land war in the region to finally settle matters. Isn't that what the interventionists want, anyway?
- rayward
February 9, 2013 at 8:00am
I get increasingly tired of Republican rhetoric, that the Sequestor cuts will be horrible for defense, but the solution is to move all the cuts to domestic spending. Then they absolutely refuse to support any changes to the Sequestor, unless domestic spending is cut. Every article about the Sequestor should point out it is Republican demands that we damage our fragile recovery that are causing the problem. Hell, it's Republican demands from 2011 that created the Sequestor in the first place. The Republican Tea-Party is responsible, and should not be allowed to duck that responsibility in any way.
- AllanL5
February 9, 2013 at 8:34pm
It's also important to note, that our swollen, 700 billion defense budget, can more easily absorb a 13% cut (wait, their part is 53 billion, since when did THAT become 13% of 700 billion?) than the already cut and stretched domestic programs, that have been under Republican attack ever since the Tea-Party came to power.
- AllanL5
February 9, 2013 at 8:36pm
I had forgotten about Bacevich's article in TNR back in 2010 in which he was highly critical of Obama for his Afghanistan policy, saying that Obama was worse than Bush because Obama didn't have his heart in the Afghanistan surge but went ahead with it anyway for political reasons. Bacevich refers to the article in his review in the NYT of Gordon and Trainor's new book about Iraq (The Endgame). It astounds me that policy makers can't come to grips with the sectarian divide in the middle east even after the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq, a bloodbath that continues today though off the front pages. And it astounds me that the US has identified Iran as our "enemy" and the greatest threat in the region though Shia Muslims account for only 15% of Muslims and Sunni Muslims attacked the US on 9/11, were the insurgents in Iraq responsible for so much US bloodshed, and are the perpetrators of most of the acts of terrorism against Israel. The gravest threat to peace isn't Muslim against Jew, but Muslim against Muslim. One can read an entire front page article in the WP or NYT about the latest violence in the region and not once will the words "Sunni" and Shia" appear. An alien from outer space could figure it out before the journalists in the US or the policy makers in Washington. Muslims are depicted as though monolithic, but they are not; the strife within Islam is far greater and more lethal than the strife between Muslim and Jew; there is no greater hatred than hatred of a heretic.
- rayward
February 10, 2013 at 1:45pm