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Email tells feds to make sequester as painful as promised
Wouldn't it just be weird if we discovered that the politicians might not be telling us the whole truth on the sequestration? I know that I would just be shocked be on words **sarcasm**
The White House announced Tuesday that it is canceling tours of the president’s home for the foreseeable future as the sequester spending cuts begin to bite and the administration makes good on its warnings of painful decisions.
Announcement of the decision — made in an email from the White House Visitors Office — came hours after The Washington
Times reported on another administration email that seemed to show at least one agency has been instructed to make sure the cuts are as painful as President Obama promised they would be.
SEE RELATED: Democrats pull out race card in sequester game
In the internal email, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown said he asked if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact, and he said he was told not to do anything that would lessen the dire impacts Congress had been warned of.
“We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be,” Mr. Brown, in the internal email, said his superiors told him.
Neither Mr. Brown nor the main APHIS office in Washington returned calls seeking comment, but Agriculture Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack, who oversees the agency, told Congress he is trying to give flexibility where he can.
“If we have flexibility, we’re going to try to use it to make sure we use sequester in the most equitable and least disruptive way,” the secretary told Rep. Kristi L. Noem, a South Dakota Republican who grilled Mr. Vilsack about the email. “There are some circumstances, and we’ve talked a lot about the meat inspection, where we do not have that flexibility because there are so few accounts.”
Ms. Noem told Mr. Vilsack that the email made it sound like the administration was sacrificing flexibility in order to justify its earlier dire predictions.
“I’m hopeful that isn’t an agenda that’s been put forward,” the congresswoman told Mr. Vilsack.
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Late Tuesday evening, the Agriculture Department issued a statement disputing Mr. Brown’s read of the situation. The department said Mr. Brown had suggested dividing his region’s cuts among a number of states but he was told that idea was already part of their sequester plans.
“The APHIS budget officer explained that USDA is already proposing these steps in order to avoid furloughs. USDA is committed to doing all we can to minimize the impact of sequester [for] our employees and the farmers, ranchers, and rural communities we serve,” the department said in its statement.
The $85 billion in automatic spending cuts began Friday, leaving the White House with tough decisions to make — though it argues its hands are tied by the way the cuts were written into law.
That’s left the administration trying to balance dire predictions with good management.
Last week, immigration officials confirmed they were releasing immigrants awaiting deportation from their detention centers in order to save money, and this week top officials said they were already seeing long lines at airports because of cuts in screenings.
But those decisions are being scrutinized as agencies continue to advertise for job openings and spend on other priorities.
The White House had to fend off questions Tuesday about the Homeland Security Department’s decision to sign a $50 million contract for new uniforms for airport screeners, just days before the sequesters.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lisa O'Brien on
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I know some who are already feeling the pain of the sequester - - a friend of mine works for the Army engineer corp, since she is essential personnel she is currently working for no pay check - because of the cuts.
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Permalink Reply by Willy on
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What most people don't seem to understand is that the sequester will only cut into moneys added on to last years budget. It's like your boss giving you a 10% raise over last years earnings, then decides to take back 1%. Nothing should change. The Democrats and Obama are trying to drum up support to prevent Conservatives from doing the budget cutting required to prevent fiscal disaster.
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Because of the sequester, they are now suspending tuition assistance to enlisted. They should let a housewife go in and make the necessary cuts- they are experts on working miracles on a budget.
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Permalink Reply by Dave on
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Part of the problem is the amount of money the government waste of a variety of things. We all remember the video of the shrimp on the treadmill for example.. there is of course plenty of other stuff... here's an article that mentions a few things:
Obscene Government Waste
March 4, 2013
The one thing the “sequester” did was to get people asking why government spending could not be reduced. Adding to the drama of the automatic cuts was the sky-is-falling, government-services-will-stop, and comparable lies the President and his cabinet secretaries told until it became obvious that the public was not buying it."
What the President did not talk about was the obscene waste of taxpayer’s money that goes on every day in every department and agency of the U.S. government. Americans are so accustomed to hearing everything described in the billions and trillions, they have lost sight of what these numbers really mean, and this is particularly true in light of the nation’s huge, growing debt and deficit.
Independent organizations such as Citizens Against Government Waste keep track and report the waste. The group has gained some fame for its annual “Pig Book”, a list of absurd spending. To its credit, the Government Accountability Office occasionally issues a report on waste when some member of Congress requests it.
Even a casual bit of research turns up item after item that, were Americans not so apathetic and indifferent to government waste, it would result in huge rallies in Washington, D.C. calling for change. There is none.
Here are some examples, a mere handful from the many anyone can discover by simply Googling “government waste.”
-- The government spends $1.7 billion for maintenance on empty buildings it owns, although some sources put the figure at closer to $25 billion. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that 55,000 properties are underutilized or entirely vacant.
-- The federal government owns approximately one-third of all U.S. land. It does not need more land and it could be argued that it should not own 80% of Nevada and Alaska, and more than half of Idaho. That said, it wants to spend $2.3 billion to purchase more land and the National park Service currently has a backlog of maintenance tasks totaling $5 billion. These include parks that the Obama administration was saying would all have to be closed down because of a sequester reduction of a mere 1.2% of all federal spending.
-- Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano was issuing statements about the sequestration cuts to her department, but according to Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, the department has $9 billion in unspent preparedness funds. How much of that will be spent on purchasing more DHS ammunition? They have already purchased enough to shoot every American five times.
-- Republican lawmakers in Congress took the sequester fear-mongering as an opportunity to note, as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) said, “There are pots of money sitting in different departments across the federal government, that have been authorized over either a number of months or years.”
-- Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is a leading budget hawk who identified programs to fund a space ship to another solar system, funds for advancements in beef jerky from France, and $6 billion for research to find out what lessons about democracy and decision-making can be learned—from fish!
-- While you’re trying to figure out how to pay your 2012 taxes, give a thought to the National Science Foundation $350,000 grant to Perdue University researchers on how to improve your golf game.
-- Not to be outspent, the National Institutes of Health gave a $940,000 grant to researchers who found that the production of pheromones in—wait for it—fruit flies, declines over time. Turns out that male fruit flies were more attracted to younger female fruit flies. The NIH also paid researchers to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they’re drunk and spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing” program on men in South Africa. You can’t make up this stuff.
-- For reasons that defy sanity, various elements of the government have spent $3 million for research on video games; $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly; a whopping $500 million on a program that would, among other things, try to figure out why five-year-olds “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom; and grants such as $1.8 million on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.
-- Sanity does not apply to the $2 billion given annually to U.S. farmers to not farm their land. Don’t even ask about the Defense Department. It has long been famous for waste.
While all this has been going on, in 2010 the Office of Management and Budget determined that $47.9 billion was spent on fraudulent or improper payments in Medicare and the problem still hasn’t been fixed, though the cost is now up to $62 billion. There’s been $2.7 billion in fraud and mismanagement of the food-stamp program. And on, and on, and on.
And the President of the United States can only talk about tax breaks for the “rich and well-connected” while spending most of his time hanging out with the “rich and well-connected.” The rest of the time is spent campaigning to get higher taxes on all the rest of us.
If you just added up the billions cited in this brief look at waste, the federal government might actually be able to get by without having run up the national debt to more than $16 trillion and running trillion-plus annual deficits.
http://cnsnews.com/blog/alan-caruba/obscene-government-waste
And here's a link to the group mentioned in the article, Citizens Against Government Waste:
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