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| U.S. President Barack Obama. Photo by: Pete Souza / White House |
Today, drastic across-the-board
cuts to U.S. government programs take effect. The impact won’t be immediate,
but further inaction by Congress will mean disaster within and beyond America’s
borders.
By now, everyone appears to have
accepted that no last-minute deal will be reached to avert sequestration, or
$85 billion in cuts from the $3.6 trillion budget originally approved by
Congress.
Cuts will be
deep to the relatively small foreign aid budget: $150 million to
humanitarian assistance, $400 million to global health, $70 million to food
aid, and $70 million to U.S. Agency
for International Development’s operation, according to
administration officials.
As hope for a deal to avoid those
across-the-board cuts is waning, all eyes are on the next deadline: March 27,
when a continuing resolution that’s kept government running over the past few
months expires. The White House and Congress have to work out again a plan to
keep the government functioning until the fiscal year ends in September.
And if that wasn’t enough, the
next budget battle is right around the corner: the fiscal 2014 appropriations.
The White House delayed the release of its budget proposal earlier this year,
but publication is imminent if lawmakers are to finalize it by Sept. 30, the end
of this fiscal year.
Another month full of uncertainty
At this point, even Washington
insiders are unsure how all these budget negotiations will end up.
“I wish I had a crystal ball,”
Tom Hart, U.S. executive director of the ONE Campaign,
an anti-poverty advocacy group, told Devex when asked about the post-March 1
scenario.
Early this week, about 150
activists affiliated with ONE went to the Hill and had 170 meetings with lawmakers
and their staff. While lawmakers sympathize with the cause, they just don’t
understand how to deal it with, Hart noted.
“No negotiations, no ideas have
been put on the table,” Hart said.
And that’s worrying, he added.
“It’s a worry because the programs
that we fight for are vulnerable,” Hart said. “And it’s a worry because the
institutions here in the U.S. are struggling to get their work done.”
Jeremy Kadden, senior legislative
manager of InterAction,
the largest alliance of U.S.-based development nongovernmental organizations,
shares that sentiment.
“Frankly, people on Capitol Hill
understand a lot of these things,” Kadden said. “They’re just not in the
position to be able to avert sequestration right now.”
So far, everything remains
inconclusive.
Senate Democrats have proposed a 50-50
solution for the sequestration that, when passed, raises revenue
from the wealthy by $55 billion and cuts spending by $55 billion. A Republican
senator suggested that to save $85 billion, the United States
should cut foreign assistance by around half or $20 billion
annually.
As of press time, no continuing
resolutions for fiscal 2013 have been filed with the Senate Appropriations
Committee, a check by Devex shows. The House Appropriations Committee, meanwhile,
is now drafting a continuing resolution, Jennifer Hing, the
comittee’s communications director, told Devex.
“Our hope is that it will be
filed for House floor consideration on Monday (March 4),” Hing said.
President Barack Obama earlier
committed to release his 2014 budget proposal in mid-March. Ideally, the White
House should have submitted its plan to Congress last month.
Whatever the plans maybe, aid
groups say cutting the foreign aid budget to save is not the way to do it.
“We’re not going to find a lot of
money there. It’s absurd,” Kadden told Devex. “If people want to balance the
budget, we need to have a conversation about what we do to make that happen.
Foreign aid is not the way to do that because it’s such a tiny percentage of
the budget anyway.”
In the coming weeks, expect a
wave of intense lobbying and advocacy campaigns on Capitol Hill.
“By March 27, we’re hoping that
that message will be gotten through, so there will be some sort of sensible
cuts from the ones we’ve been seeing so far,” Kadden said.
On the chopping block
While uncertainty looms, what is
certain, according to aid groups, is the impact of the federal cuts overseas:
- 3 million children can’t go to school.
- 2.1 million people can starve without food aid.
- 1 million children won’t get vaccines.
- 175,000 people won’t receive antiretroviral vaccines.
Who’s going to be that starving
kid is another issue altogether. And it depends on how USAID chooses which
programs to cut and which country suffers from the cut.
“The challenge, of course, is for
USAID having to prepare for an ever-changing-but-never-resolved budget. And
that can’t be easy for any agency,” said Sarah Jane Staats, director of policy
outreach at the Center for
Global Development. “Some of the federal agencies whose entire
mission is based on personnel is going to be much more difficult. I think USAID
will have a little flexibility in the program side but not much.”
USAID should choose wisely among
the myriad of projects and programs it’s implementing around the world.
“I think the first place to look
would be looking for cases where USAID has programs where the presence is going
to be costly in terms of having USAID staff in a country and the program fund
is relatively small and maybe not garnering the biggest impact,” Staats said.
Her suggestion echoes what USAID
has in mind.
Last year, USAID Deputy Administrator Don
Steinberg told Devex: “This is a period where we’re going to have to
focus and concentrate our efforts, and that’s part of what we’re doing right
now, which is to eliminate some of our smaller programs where we cannot show
development results.”
The ongoing budget crisis, Staats
said, forces USAID to think.
“It could help them make some of
the tough decisions that they wanted to make in the past but haven’t been able
to,” she said.
Still, the game is not entirely
played by USAID alone.
“A lot of it depends on the rules
of the game that are coming from beyond USAID in terms of where the cuts will
come from and how much flexibility the USAID will have in applying those,”
Staats said.
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