Posts Tagged ‘automatic spending cuts’

Despite the need to identify $50-plus billion in fiscal 2014 savings — barring a long-term deficit reduction deal that replaces the sequester — the Obama administration and Congress likely will put off discussing ways to trim the defense budget until late in the process for crafting spending bills for the department. The White House already has said the FY 2014 budget request it sends to Congress next week will ignore sequestration, which would pare defense spending by 9.9 percent next year …

To prove that sequestration is hurting people across the nation that work for the federal government or rely on it for contracts, funding or other services, the Huffington Post compiled a list of 100 local media stories offering examples of the hardships caused by $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that went into effect last month. About seven of the examples involved military facilities, where the primary impacts consisted of planned furloughs of civilian employees and military technicians in the National Guard, along with the termination of contract and term employees …

If sequestration continues into fiscal 2014 and beyond, the Pentagon will not rely on furloughs of civilian employees to find savings, but rather will explore “other options,” DOD Comptroller Robert Hale said Monday. “They may not be pleasant, and they may force us into some difficult choices. But we definitely don’t want to repeat what we’re doing now …

California Gov. Jerry Brown established a state military council Thursday to preserve the military’s role in the state’s economy and expand defense-related investment in California. The panel will be responsible for protecting California’s military installations and operations amid ongoing Pentagon budget cuts, and it will respond to changes in military strategy to position the state to continue innovation and leadership in its military mission …

More than 700,000 civilian workers at DOD will be forced to take 14 days of unpaid leave in fiscal 2013, eight fewer days than officials had been expecting, as a result of the spending measure President Obama signed into law on Tuesday. By shifting $10 billion into the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance accounts, the FY 2013 spending bill alleviated a shortfall in the account that pays for civilian salaries, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters on Thursday …

The sequester will force the Pentagon to cope with a $41 billion spending reduction in the current fiscal year, rather than an estimated $46 billion, after the fiscal 2013 spending package signed into law this week trimmed defense funding sufficiently to comply with the FY 2013 cap on discretionary spending. The continuing resolution that funded government operations in the first half of the year exceeded the discretionary cap imposed by 2011′s Budget Control Act and, as a result, would have triggered a second sequester to bring the defense budget in line with the cap …

Civilian workers, particularly the newest ones, at Watervliet Arsenal in Upstate New York worry about how they will make ends meet in the face of furloughs which could eliminate up to 20 percent of their pay over the last six months of the fiscal year. The workforce at Watervliet Arsenal, which was designated a center of industrial and technical excellence for cannon and mortar manufacturing in January, has an average hourly wage of less than $28 …

The Defense Department may finally have acknowledged it will need to deal with the sequester this year, but officials remain in denial that they will need to plan for deep spending cuts that could last past the end of the decade, several experts said at a budget forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. “There still is a creeping lack of realism over there. They have their fingers crossed that this will somehow all go away and be better,” said Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center …

Pentagon officials are now looking at “tough choices” to find $46 billion in spending cuts even after Congress passed a continuing resolution that provides some fiscal relief.

The House on Thursday quickly approved a fiscal 2013 continuing resolution to keep the government open through Sept. 30, sending the bill to President Obama for his signature. The stopgap spending measure — which includes individual spending bills for defense, military construction-veterans affairs, homeland security, agriculture and commerce-justice-science — locks in $85 billion in sequester cuts for FY 2013. It provides $984 billion in discretionary spending for fiscal 2013, after accounting for the across-the-board spending reductions …