Washington’s partisan Budget squabbles created real-world consequences for Americans in 2013 when federal programs big and small were forced to cut a cumulative total of more than $85 billion from their budgets. As a result, numerous programs sustained serious blows to their bottom line.
U.S. military forces skipped critical training programs and grounded popular air force and navy air shows. Federal grant money dried up for scientific research into cancer and Alzheimer disease. National parks deferred maintenance on hiking trails and canceled services at such iconic sites as Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu. In addition, hundreds of thousands of federal workers from the Pentagon to the EPA were furloughed for several days without pay.
Democratic Pres. Barack Obama and Republican leaders in Congress traded blame over which party was responsible for the budget cuts, known in Washington parlance as sequestration. In the end both sides of the aisle had played a role in reaching the “fiscal cliff.” During budget negotiations in 2011, Democrats and Republicans had agreed to implement sequestration’s dramatic spending cuts only if the two parties could not first find consensus on other ways to cut the country’s ballooning federal deficit. Surely, the party leaders reasoned, calmer heads would prevail. After all, the budget cuts—totaling $1.2 trillion and stretching out over a decade—were designed to affect large parts of the government in a fashion that could damage a still-recovering economy. On top of that, Republicans would not allow the Department of Defense (DOD) to suffer, whereas Democrats would do anything to protect cherished social programs for seniors, the poor, and the environment. Over the next 18 months, however, negotiations between the White House and Republicans went nowhere. Conservative Republicans elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010 remained in power after the 2012 campaign and insisted on spending cuts, even if such slashes went against the GOP’s traditional stance to defend the Pentagon’s coffers. Democrats, emboldened by Obama’s own reelection in 2012, demanded that the spending cuts be abandoned in favour of raising revenue through tax hikes, a poisonous pill to Republicans.
At the beginning of March, President Obama had no choice but to begin year one of sequestration cuts. It was a monumental management challenge. Most agencies had done little planning prior to the deadline and were left scrambling to decipher whether anything in their budgets could be spared. The cabinet refused to talk publicly about how it would implement the cuts, prompting Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to complain that the White House had put a “gag order” on everyone but the secretary of defense.
When Obama and his administration did speak up, the warnings issued were dubbed as false or misleading by media fact checkers. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was forced to backtrack after making the claim that teachers were already getting pink slips because of sequestration. President Obama got into trouble when he said that federal prosecutors might need to let some criminals go free.
Republicans seized on the administration’s errant statements and argued that Democrats were more interested in scaring the public than in finding a reasonable solution to the budget stalemate. If Obama really wanted to, they claimed, he could order his government to make the budget cuts less painful. Agency heads, they argued, had the flexibility under the law to determine where money could be saved.
Sequestration was not so simple. The law stated that the budget cuts had to be made from both defense-related programs and the nondefense side of the ledger. Some programs would be spared, such as military troop pay, Social Security, and Medicaid. In addition, agencies that did not rely on Congress to approve the purse strings remained unaffected, including the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak. However, large parts of the government had no such protection.
At the Pentagon military and civilian leaders ordered fewer training exercises and kept warships stuck in port. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno likened the situation to the military’s “hollow force” of the post-Vietnam era in the late 1970s, when it struggled to handle a single major contingency. In all, about 680,000 DOD civilian employees received furlough notices. Workers originally were told to stay home without pay for 11 days, though Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel later reduced the furloughs to 6 days after Congress granted permission to move funding among different budget accounts.
Because of the furloughs, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the EPA added an extra weekday surrounding long holiday weekends to close everything but their essential services. The jockeying was a powerful symbol of what dysfunctional government looks like.
Sequestration also played tricks with the economy. Obama had warned in early 2013 that the budget cuts would hit the economy like a “meat cleaver,” cutting growth in jobs and GDP. A study conducted by George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., suggested that nearly one million small-business jobs were at risk. Although the stock market reached record highs during the year and housing prices grew in many parts of the country, sequestration had taken a toll in regions with a large federal footprint, including Washington, D.C., and many military-minded communities.
Public health and safety also faced challenges. Federal workers who monitored food-borne illness said that they did not have all the technologies that they needed to track a rare parasite outbreak that sickened 600 people in 22 states over the summer. Furloughs threatened public defenders, including the lawyers representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect. (See Special Report.) After the mass shooting in mid-September at the Washington Navy Yard that left 12 people dead, Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray questioned whether the federal government had “somehow skimped” on security because of sequestration.
Congress responded to sequestration’s most-visible effects with patchwork laws. Federal meat inspectors were given money to stay on the job after a heavy lobbying campaign from agriculture interests. Also spared was a popular college-tuition-funding program providing up to $4,500 a year to active-duty military troops. After thousands of flights were delayed during sequestration’s opening weeks, Obama signed a law allowing Federal Aviation Administration-run air-traffic control towers to again be fully staffed.
Obama administration officials also avoided sequestration to protect life and property. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in June canceled plans to furlough 12,000 workers after a series of tornadoes smacked Oklahoma and Missouri. The State Department, under heavy political pressure after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, avoided furloughs and instead found budget savings through cuts to travel and conferences. Attorney General Eric Holder cited the recent Boston Marathon bombing in announcing that the Department of Justice would remain fully staffed.
By year’s end many in Washington had come to the conclusion that, unfortunately, sequestration would stay in play for another nine years. The White House ordered government agencies to start writing their next budget requests while taking into account deep cuts of more than 10%. Hagel said that the Pentagon should prepare for a decade of making do with less money.
Political divisions were also too deep to expect a late breakthrough. Speaker of the House John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said that his party could not secure a better deal to control government spending. Ultimately, the Democrats’ alternatives to sequestration remained untenable for most Republicans.
In October some of the same forces that had prompted sequestration created another unthinkable result when large parts of the government were shut down for 16 days. The dysfunction was so severe that the two parties could not even set aside their philosophical disagreements to keep basic government operations running. By year’s end, however, Washington somehow managed to strike a deal to temper sequestration’s second and third year of cuts; about $65 billion in spending was added for fiscal years 2014 and 2015, and the next round of across-the-board cuts for the Pentagon was squelched. Though the agreement was not perfect, it meant that Washington could return to some semblance of budget normalcy, and it offered some relief from the seemingly endless cycles of self-inflicted crises.