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WASHINGTON
- The potentially massive cuts in federal spending that could cascade
through federal and state agencies beginning in three days were
conceived a year and a half ago as Washington's own version of a game of
chicken.
Damaging ‘sequester’ cuts rooted in decades of dysfunction
By Bryan Bender
Globe Staff /
February 25, 2013
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WASHINGTON — The potentially massive cuts in federal spending that
could cascade through federal and state agencies beginning in three days
were conceived a year and a half ago as Washington’s own version of a
game of chicken.
The across-the-board reductions in everything from military spending
to aid to the poor would prove so politically unpalatable, the thinking
went, that the political parties would be forced to agree on a more
sound plan to bring the deficit under control.
But it hasn’t worked, and with prospects for a deal by Friday’s
deadline dwindling, the once-distant threat of automatic cuts is now
real.
That, in turn, has focused attention on why the nation is facing yet
another political crisis that some say could hobble important government
operations.
The roots of the so-called sequestration cuts can be traced back
nearly two decades, according to longtime participants in the
legislative process. It was set in motion, they contend, when Congress
began failing to fulfill a key responsibility: drafting and approving
budgets for the federal government each year that funded social programs
and other investments, raised enough taxes to pay for them, and curbed
ballooning expenses enough to balance the books.
“This has a long history of Congress failing to make hard decisions,”
said G. William Hoagland, vice president of the Bipartisan Policy
Center in Washington who served as a senior GOP staff member on the
Senate Budget Committee from 1986 to 2003. “Congress’s failure to take
on entitlement programs and raise revenues in a serious manner . . . is
how we ended up with these reductions. Now it is really going to come
home to roost.”
The idea of automatic budget cuts as a last resort was conceived by
the late New Hampshire Republican Senator Warren Rudman. The idea was to
set a deadline that would trigger across-the-board cuts that spared no
agency or program, thinking that would motivate Congress to do its job
and pass a workable budget.
It proved an effective nudge — at least for a while.
Former Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell of
Maine, who oversaw a number of compromises in Congress, including a 1990
budget deal that averted the need for such automatic cuts, said in an
interview Monday that the old threat no longer works.
“Now you have a substantial number of House Republicans who appear
to truly believe that the only solution is massive spending cuts,” he
said. Such a policy would plunge the nation into recession or worse, he
warned.
To underscore that analysis, Senate Democrats on Monday said they
plan to propose a measure this week that would delay the bulk of the
automatic cuts until the end of the year, for now substituting targeted
cuts and closing tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.
But Democrats acknowledged there is little hope that proposal could
pass the House, where advocates of small government welcome the
across-the-board automatic spending cuts.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said President Obama supports
the plan, which he said will shift the ball into House Republicans’
court, adding that Obama will continue to take his case to the public to
pressure GOP lawmakers.
“Senate Democrats have put forward a proposal that does not ask much
in terms of hard choices for House Republicans,” Carney said during
Monday’s press briefing. “The president has said that we have to do this
in a balanced way.”
Obama told the nation’s governors at a meeting at the White House
Monday that it’s up to Congress to avert the cuts “with just a little
bit of compromise,” urging members of the National Governors Association
to speak with their states’ congressional delegations to “remind them
in no uncertain terms exactly what is at stake.”
The president has come under fire from critics who contend that he
has not reached out to the GOP to initiate talks that may produce a
last-minute deal. Carney said Monday that Obama spoke with lawmakers
last week and “will continue to engage with Congress,” though he added
no further specifics on meetings leading up to Friday’s deadline.
Congress, however, has failed now for years to complete the basic
task of passing an annual budget on time and has often been forced to
pass a so-called “continuing resolution” to keep the government
operating at the previous year’s levels, without which it would have to
close many operations.
“Most of the time over the past 15 years the Congress has not met its
schedule to pass a budget,” said Gordon Adams, a former White House
budget official who now teaches government at American University. “The
partisan political atmosphere has exacerbated a process that was broken
to begin with.”Continued...
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeBender. Michael Kranish of the Globe Washington Bureau contributed.
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