Courtesy Senator Bernie Sanders web site: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/
Sen. Bernie Sanders called on Tuesday for an investigation into oil price manipulation. He also proposed a 30-day deadline for federal regulators to use emergency powers to curb excessive speculation in crude oil markets.
Over the past five months, the national average price for a gallon of gasoline has gone up by more than 41 cents. The price hikes come at a time when U.S. oil inventories reached a three-decade high while demand for gasoline is lower than four years ago when prices averaged less than $2.30 a gallon.
Sanders spoke about rapidly rising gas prices during a Senate floor speech on two amendments he proposed to the farm bill.
From Senator Bernie Sanders web site: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/
May 8, 2013
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday brought together seniors and veterans organizations and other members of Congress for a Capitol summit meeting to protest proposed cuts in Social Security and disabled veterans’ benefits. “There are fair ways to reduce deficit but balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children and the poor are not among them,” Sanders said.
By permission: Everything We Know About What’s Happened Under Sequestration by Theodoric Meyer ProPublica, May 7, 2013, 8:45 a.m. We’ve updated our sequestration explainer to reflect new developments. It was originally published on April 11, 2013.
When the annual White House Easter Egg Hunt faced cancellation this year due to the package of mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration, the National Park Service kicked into high gear. It rescued the event 2014 held since 1878 2014 with money from “corporate sponsors and the sale of commemorative wooden eggs,” according to the Washington Post.
The nation’s airline passengers also caught a break last month when Congress passed (and President Obama quickly signed) a bill allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift some funds and halt the furloughs of air traffic controllers that had been blamed for long flight delays around the country.
But other programs haven’t been so lucky. Children in Indiana have been cut from the federally funded Head Start preschool program, and one Head Start program in Maine is being cut altogether. Furloughs have begun for employees of agencies from the U.S. Park Police to the Environmental Protection Agency. And cuts to Medicare have forced cancer clinics to turn away thousands of patients who are being treated with drugs the clinics can no longer afford.
We’ve taken a look at what’s actually happened in the two months since sequestration took effect.
Remind me, what is sequestration again?
Remember the clash over the debt ceiling back in 2011?
When Republicans and Obama struck a deal to raise it, they created a “super committee” of six Democrats and six Republicans and gave them three and a half months to hash out $1.2 trillion worth of cuts to the federal budget over the next decade. If they failed, a package of automatic cuts designed to slash funding to programsdear to both parties (military spending, in the Republicans’ case, and Medicare and other domestic programs in the Democrats’) would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013.
Needless to say, the super committee failed, leading to the cuts we’re seeing now.
How does this fit in with the “fiscal cliff”?
Sequestration was one element of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which also included a number of other spending cuts and tax increases. Congress passed a last-minute deal Jan. 1 to blunt the cliff’s impact, which included pushing back the effective date for sequestration to March 1. While Obama and members of Congress spoke out against sequestration in February 2014 Senate Democrats announced a plan to put it off for another 10 months 2014 those efforts failed to stop the cuts.
So what’s happened since March 1?
The indiscriminate cuts affected a wide range of federal programs and departments, making them difficult to track. (Even the White House struggled to explain exactly which programs they’d hit while it was denouncing them.) Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters Feb. 28 that sequestration would have “a rolling impact, an effect that will build and build and build.”
Congress passed a bill, signed by Obama on March 26, to spare a few programs from cuts this year, including an infant nutrition program, the nuclear weapons program and funding for security at U.S. embassies abroad 2014 a sensitive area since the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The bill also gave some agencies, including the Pentagon, more flexibility in carrying out the sequester. And last week, Congress quickly passed (and Obama signed) a bill allowing the F.A.A. to scrap its furloughs of air traffic controllers, which had been blamed for long flight delays. But neither bill reduced the total amount the government is required to cut 2014 $85 billion 2014 by the end of the fiscal year in October.
Gotcha. What has all this done to the economy?
The Congressional Budget Office estimates sequestration will cost around 750,000 jobs in total, and forecasters think it could reduce economic growth by half a percentage point this year. But two months into sequestration, the effects are difficult to see. The economy added a relatively respectable 165,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department reported (though the federal government shed 8,000 jobs during the same period). And defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which warned that the sequester would lead to layoffs, have seen only a slight decline in their business.
Indeed, there’s at least one slice of the workforce that seems to be benefitting from sequestration: Washington lawyers. Contractors short on cash have hired attorneys to help them restructure loan payments.
Do we know any more about what’s been affected?
Yes. Sequestration is still playing out, but here’s what we know has happened so far:
Congress:
While lawmakers’ salaries are exempt from cuts, sequestration hasn’t spared congressional offices, which have had to slash spending by 8.2 percent. “Magazine subscriptions have been canceled,” the Washington Post reported. “Constituents are getting e-mail instead of snail mail. Invoices are getting a second look.” Sequestration has also cut into funding for the overseas fact-finding trips lawmakers often take, known as “codels.” House Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican, has banned his caucus from using military aircraft for codels.
The White House:
While the egg hunt was saved, the White House announced in March that it would stop giving tours due to sequestration. (Republicans criticized the decision, with Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma calling it “a dramatic overreaction.”) The White House has also furloughed 480 Office of Management and Budget staffers, and the president will voluntarily return 5 percent of his salary. Sam Kass, the assistant White House chef, has said he is also being furloughed. But Roll Call reported that the White House 2014 which spent “more than a month of dodging questions” about the effects of sequestration on West Wing staffers 2014seems to have been spared from deep cuts.
Federal Agencies:
A few agencies, such as Department of Veterans Affairs, are mostly exempt from the sequester.
But the budget cuts have hit most others, sometimes with unpredictable consequences. After sequestration forced Yellowstone National Park to cut $1.75 million from its $35 million budget, the park 2014 run by the National Park Service 2014 trimmed its payroll and decided to cut back on snowplowing, which would delay the park’s opening. Plowing was saved only when the Cody and Jackson Hole, Wyo., chambers of commerce, fearing the economic impact of a late park opening, kicked in $170,000.
In Washington, agency after agency is planning to furlough its employees. “The Department of Housing and Urban Development,” the Washington Post reported, “will shut down for seven days starting in May, after concluding that staggering furloughs for 9,000 employees would create too much paperwork.” The Internal Revenue Service will also shut down almost entirely on furlough days. And Department of Labor employees have already started taking their furlough days, which they can do a half-day at a time.
The Department of Labor is also planning to lay off 30 of the 74 lawyers it hired to work through a backlog of mine-safety citations that are under appeal. The department had hired the lawyers after a 2010 explosion at a mine run by a company that had received many such citations but fought them, preventing regulatory action against it. The move will save the Labor Department $2.1 million.
And while air traffic controllers won’t be furloughed, it’s unclear whether the FAA will follow through on its plans to close 149 airport control towers, most of them at rural airports. New Jersey officials, for instance, remain uncertain whether the Trenton, N.J., airport tower will be closed or receive a reprieve.
Meanwhile, IRS furloughs have the potential to be counterproductive. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew told a House Appropriations subcommittee in April that the cuts would lead the IRS to answer fewer calls and take longer to respond to taxpayer questions.
“It will also lead to fewer enforcement actions and reduce revenue collection,” Lew said 2014 which could cost the government money rather than saving it.
The Pentagon:
Despite the bill Obama signed in March giving the Pentagon more flexibility in carrying out the sequester, it still must cut $41 billion from its budget this year, which Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described as “the steepest decline in our budget ever.” (The Pentagon has been asked to cut more before, but never halfway through the fiscal year.)
Hundreds of thousands of civilian Defense Department employees will likely have to take 14 furlough days by October, though it’s unclear which branches will face them. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has said that everything from salaries and benefits to the number of generals and admirals could be cut.
Medicare:
Cancer clinics in March began turning away thousands of Medicare patients being treated with expensive chemotherapy drugs, which the clinics say they can no longer afford. “Legislators meant to partially shield Medicare from the automatic budget cuts triggered by the sequester, limiting the program to a 2 percent reduction 2014 a fraction of the cuts seen by other federal programs,” the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff reported. “But oncologists say the cut is unexpectedly damaging for cancer patients because of the way those treatments are covered.” Medicare has said that it doesn’t have the power to restore funding for the drugs. (Rep. Renee Ellmers, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill that would reverse the cuts, but the legislation remains in committee.)
Education:
The federally funded Head Start early education program is expected to lose around 70,000 of its roughly 1 million slots due to sequestration. Those cuts have already hit children in Indiana, where Head Start programs in two towns resorted to a lottery system in March to determine which kids could remain. A Head Start program in Birmingham, Ala., will shut down for 10 weeks this summer, and one in Pejebscot, Maine, will close for good. Other Head Start programs 2014 such as one in Passaic County, N.J., that expects to lose about $200,000 of its roughly $4 million in federal funding 2014 won’t have to wrestle with cuts until the fall. A program in Colorado Springs faced with cutting 142 spots this fall had children decorate empty chairs that it has sold for $500 apiece to raise money. It has saved two spots so far.
The Head Start cuts have come even as the president called for a massive expansion of preschool.
Sequestration is also hitting schools on Indian reservations, where federal funds can make up 60 percent of a school’s budget. The Fort Peck Indian reservation in Montana “can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level,” according to the Washington Post. Summer school may be cancelled. And the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota 2014 where a shooting at the high school left seven people dead in 2005 2014 has cut its security staff, as well as course offerings and support staff, in response to sequestration.
Scientific Research:
The sequester has also hacked away at funding for scientific research. The National Science Foundation expects to make 1,000 fewer grants this year. Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., will admit fewer science and engineering graduate students. And the directors of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories expect that the “drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years.”
More than 50 Nobel laureates have signed a letter protesting the cuts, which Hunter R. Rawlings III, the president of the Association of American Universities, has also decried. “To put it kindly, this is an irrational approach to deficit reduction,” he told a Senate committee in February. “To put it not so kindly, it is just plain stupid.”
Court System:
Sequestration has cut the federal judiciary’s budget by almost $350 million for the 2013 fiscal year, which is already half over. In Massachusetts, public defenders will have to take 16½ furlough days 2014 which could lead to a backlog in the court system 2014 and funding for drug and mental health services will be cut by 20 percent. In Dallas, the public defender’s office will shut down every Friday for the next six months. In California, the U.S. District Court of the Northern District will shutter its courtrooms in San Francisco, San Jose and Eureka on the first Friday of every month through September. And in Nebraska, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Kopf said he is “seriously considering” dismissing some criminal cases.
The sequester also has the potential to impact terrorism cases.
Public defenders representing Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a former Al Qaeda spokesman and a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden charged with conspiring to kill Americans, have requested that a federal judge push back the trial date because of furloughs in their office. “It’s extremely troublesome to contemplate the possibility of a case of this nature being delayed because of sequestration,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in Federal District Court in Manhattan. “Let me say only that 2014 stunning.”
And the Massachusetts public defender’s office, which is representing Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, still has to deal with furloughs. “No one knows exactly how it will affect things,” a federal court official told ABC News.
Wow. Anything else?
Sequestration has led a number of states to cut their emergency unemployment benefits. Programs designed to help victims of domestic violence have had their funding slashed. And less federal funding has meant to cuts to Meals on Wheels programs in places such as Roanoke, Va, which recently started a waiting list. “We’ve never had a waiting list,” Michele Daley, the director of nutrition services at the Local Office on Aging, which administers Meals on Wheels in four Virginia counties, told the Huffington Post. “This is the first time ever and it’s a direct result of sequestration.”
Has anybody beside the FAA beaten sequestration?
Yes. Weeks before the sequester hit, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack started describing how his department would have to furlough meat inspectors if the cuts went through, forcing meat-processing plants to shut down on furlough days. His talk convinced the meat inspectors’ union and other industry heavyweights to start lobbying. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation went to work, and the Senate ended up moving $55 million from other Agriculture Department programs to the inspectors.
The pet industry also successfully lobbied (yes, the pet industry has a lobbying group) for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore overtime and weekend inspections of commercial wildlife imports and exports, including exotic snakes, birds and lizards bound for American homes. But the decision may not be as silly as it sounds 2014 the importers and exporters pay substantial fees for the inspections.
How can I keep up with the sequester?
Here are some great resources for tracking the overall impact:
Mother Jones has examples of how sequestration has played out in each of the 50 states.
By Permission: Senator Pushes for Investigation of 2018 False Statements’ by Dark Money Groups by Lois Beckett ProPublica, April 10, 2013, 12:15 p.m.4/10:
This post has been updated with response from Whitehouse’s office.
A Democratic senator is pushing for an investigation of nonprofit groups that told the Internal Revenue Service they would not engage in political activity 2014 and then spent millions attacking or praising candidates in 2012 elections.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, said at a campaign finance hearing yesterday that there were “numerous instances” in which nonprofit groups may have made false statements to the IRS about whether they planned to be involved in federal or local elections.
Applications for tax-exempt status are submitted to the IRS under penalty of perjury. If the IRS is not well-suited to investigate these “plain vanilla criminal cases,” the U.S. Department of Justice should, Whitehouse said.
ProPublica has reported extensively on the gap between what these groups told the IRS they would do in their applications for tax-exempt status and what they actually did.
Part of the benefit of being recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit is that these “social welfare” groups do not have to disclose their donors publicly. But in order to quality as a 501(c)(4), groups cannot make influencing elections their primary activity.
In 2008, Western Tradition Partnership, now known as American Tradition Partnership, told the IRS that it would not attempt to sway elections. Shortly before submitting this application, it had blitzed Montana voters with fliers weighing in on candidates in the state’s Republican primary. After the IRS approved the group’s tax-exempt status, it continued to send out fliers supporting or opposing candidates in both Montana and Colorado.
Similarly, the Government Integrity Fund told the IRS in 2011 that it did not plan to spend any money influencing elections. Then, in 2012, the group spent more than $1 million on ads attacking Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and praising his Republican opponent, Josh Mandel.
When Arizona-based Americans for Responsible Leadership applied for tax-exempt status in 2012, the group had already spent $5,300 on get-out-the-vote efforts for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and given $57,500 to two Republican political committees in Arizona.
But it told the IRS in a confidential filing that it had not spent any money, and did not plan to spend any money, influencing state, local, or federal elections. The group would go on to spend $5.2 million on campaign activities in the fall of 2012, most of it on phone calls urging the defeat of President Barack Obama.
After ProPublica ran a story on the group, a lawyer for Americans for Responsible Leadership told the Arizona Capital Times that the group had submitted an “amended application” to the IRS that “corrected the error.”
The Government Integrity Fund told ProPublica that it worked hard to be in compliance with the law and that “Legally, the concept of 2018influencing elections’ has been narrowly defined.”
And the American Tradition Partnership’s executive director said that ATP had obeyed all applicable laws and “does not, and never will, tell voters which candidates to vote for.”
At the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on campaign finance law enforcement hearing, Whitehouse did not mention any nonprofit groups by name, but he cited ProPublica’s reporting on these groups at length in his introduction to the hearing, as his spokesman noted.
Whether or not the IRS or the Justice Department is already investigating any of these groups is not clear. Representatives who testified at the hearing would not comment on any ongoing investigations.
Larry Noble, the president of Americans for Campaign Reform, said at the hearing that the IRS and the Justice Department were hesitant to enforce the laws on the books because of “fear of getting involved in politics, fear of being called partisan when you’re not.”
Mythili Raman, the acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, testified that the rise of new 501(c)(4) groups active in politics increased the risk of “bad actors using the anonymity that’s given to them when they donate” to corrupt the political process.
Raman said that the department needed more transparency in order to enforce anti-corruption laws2014as well as a clearer definition of “coordination.” Super PACs and 501(c)(4) “dark money” nonprofits can raise unlimited amounts of money, but they aren’t allowed to “coordinate” their advertising spending or other political activities with candidates’ campaign. Proving coordination, though, isn’t easy.
“We simply don’t have the tools to tell if super PACs are illegally coordinating with campaigns,” Raman testified.
Part of the issue, she said in her prepared testimony, was that the Federal Elections Committee has failed to define whether certain activities2014 like a candidate’s mother running a super PAC expressly supporting his candidacy2014count as coordination.
Whitehouse also pressed for investigations of whether individuals or organizations had created “shell companies” or used 501(c)(4)’s to donate money to political action committees in order to avoid disclosure requirements. Americans for Responsible Leadership is currently under investigation in California for what a state watchdog group called “campaign money laundering.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said at the hearing that aggressive enforcement of campaign finance laws might restrict free speech. He cautioned against any “prior restraint, or punishment after the fact” for citizens who choose to speak out against their elected officials.
Cruz said that Organizing for Action, a continuation of Obama’s reelection campaign that is now operating as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, was currently running ads against him, and that his campaign for Senate had been on “the receiving end of $35 million in attack ads.”
“God bless them for speaking out and being involved in politics,” Cruz said.
Republished by permission: Everything We Know About What’s Happened Under Sequestration by Theodoric Meyer ProPublica, April 11, 2013, 1:41 p.m.
When the annual White House Easter Egg Hunt faced cancellation this year due to the package of mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration, the National Park Service kicked into high gear. It rescued the event 2014 held since 1878 2014 with money from “corporate sponsors and the sale of commemorative wooden eggs,” according to the Washington Post.
Other programs haven’t been so lucky. Children in Indiana have been cut from the federally funded Head Start preschool program. Last week, the White House announced furloughs for480 staffers in the Office of Management and Budget. And cuts to Medicare have forced cancer clinics to turn away thousands of patients who are being treated with drugs the clinics can no longer afford.
We’ve taken a look at what’s actually happened in the six weeks since sequestration took effect.
Remind me, what is sequestration again?
Remember the clash over the debt ceiling back in 2011? When Republicans and President Obama struck a deal to raise it, they created a “super committee” of six Democrats and six Republicans and gave them three and a half months to hash out $1.2 trillion worth of cuts to the federal budget over the next decade. If they failed, a package of automatic cuts designed to slash funding to programs dear to both parties (military spending, in the Republicans’ case, and Medicare and other domestic programs in the Democrats’) would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013.
Needless to say, the super committee failed, leading to the cuts we’re seeing now.
How does this fit in with the “fiscal cliff”?
Sequestration was one element of the “fiscal cliff,” which also included a number of other spending cuts and tax increases. Congress passed a last-minute deal Jan. 1 to blunt the cliff’s impact, which included pushing back the effective date for sequestration to March 1. While Obama and members of Congress spoke out against the sequestration in February 2014 Senate Democrats announced a plan to put it off for another 10 months 2014 those efforts failed to stop the cuts.
So what’s happened since March 1?
The indiscriminate cuts span a wide range of federal programs and departments, making them difficult to track. (Even the White House struggled to explain exactly which programs they’d hit as it was denouncing them.) Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters Feb. 28 that sequestration would have “a rolling impact, an effect that will build and build and build.”
Congress passed a bill, signed by Obama on March 26, to spare a few programs from cuts this year, including an infant nutrition program, the nuclear weapons program and funding for security at U.S. embassies abroad 2014 a sensitive area since the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The bill also gave some agencies, including the Pentagon, more flexibility in carrying out the sequester. But it didn’t reduce the total amount the government is required to cut 2014 $85 billion 2014 by the end of the fiscal year in October.
Gotcha. What has all this done to the economy?
The Congressional Budget Office estimates sequestration will cost around 750,000 jobs in total, and forecasters think it could reduce economic growth by half a percentage point this year. But with much of the sequester only beginning taking effect, the effects have been hard to see so far. The sequester doesn’t seem to be responsible for the weak March jobs report, Annie Lowrey writes on the New York Times’ Economix blog, and most furloughs have yet to take effect.
Do we know any more about what’s been affected?
Yes. Sequestration is still playing out, but here’s what we know has happened so far:
Congress: While lawmakers’ salaries are exempt from cuts, sequestration hasn’t spared congressional offices, which have had to slash their spending by 8.2 percent. “Magazine subscriptions have been canceled,” the Washington Post reported. “Constituents are getting e-mail instead of snail mail. Invoices are getting a second look.” Sequestration has also cut into funding for the overseas fact-finding trips lawmakers often take, known as “codels.” House Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican, banned his caucus from using military aircraft for codels in February.
The White House: While the egg hunt was saved, the White House announced last month that it would stop giving tours due to sequestration. (Republicans criticized the decision, with Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma calling it “a dramatic overreaction.”) The White House has also furloughed 480 Office of Management and Budget staffers, and the president will voluntarily return 5 percent of his salary. (Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other officials have also announced that they will return a portion of their salaries.) But Roll Call has reported that the White House 2014 which spent “more than a month of dodging questions” about the effects of sequestration on West Wing staffers 2014seems to have been spared from deep cuts.
Federal Agencies: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and other officials predicted in February that sequestration would cause lengthy delays at airports, but such delays don’t seem to have occurred. Flights on U.S.-based airlines came in on time with about the same frequency during the last two weeks in March as they did during the same period last year, the Los Angeles Times reported. But sequestration’s effects on other federal agencies and departments have been very real.
After sequestration forced Yellowstone National Park to cut $1.75 million from its $35 million budget, the park 2014 run by the National Park Service 2014 trimmed its payroll and decided to cut back on snowplowing, which would delay the park’s opening. Plowing was saved only when the Cody and Jackson Hole, Wyo., chambers of commerce, fearing the economic impact of a late park opening, kicked in $170,000.
In Washington, agency after agency is planning to furlough its employees. “The Department of Housing and Urban Development,” the Washington Post reported, “will shut down for seven days starting in May, after concluding that staggering furloughs for 9,000 employees would create too much paperwork.” And the Department of Labor is planning to lay off 30 of the 74 lawyers it hired to work through a backlog of mine-safety citations that are under appeals. The department had hired the lawyers after a 2010 explosion at a mine run by a company that had received many such citations but fought them, preventing regulatory action against it. The move will save the Labor Department $2.1 million.
And while airline delays haven’t materialized, the Federal Aviation Administration has announced that it plans to close 149 airport control towers. Most of them are at rural airports, but the north tower at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is also on the list. The tower and O’Hare’s 27 Right runway opened in 2008 as part of a $450 million project that has boosted significantly the number of planes the airport can handle. But furloughs for O’Hare’s air traffic controllers mean the tower and the runway might be shut down for part of each day. After protests, the F.A.A. announced last week that it would delay the closings until June.
The Pentagon: Even with the bill signed by Obama in March, the Pentagon still must cut $41 billion from its budget this year, which Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described as “the steepest decline in our budget ever.” (The Pentagon has been asked to cut more before, but never halfway through the fiscal year.)
Hundreds of thousands of civilian Defense Department employees will likely have to take 14 furlough days by October. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last week that everything from weapons to the number of generals and admirals could be cut.
Medicare: Cancer clinics last week began turning away thousands of Medicare patients being treated with expensive chemotherapy drugs, which the clinics say they can no longer afford. “Legislators meant to partially shield Medicare from the automatic budget cuts triggered by the sequester, limiting the program to a 2 percent reduction 2014 a fraction of the cuts seen by other federal programs,” the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff reported. “But oncologists say the cut is unexpectedly damaging for cancer patients because of the way those treatments are covered.” Medicare has said that it doesn’t have the power to restore funding for the drugs. (Rep. Renee Ellmers, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill this week that would reverse the cuts.)
Education: The federally funded Head Start early education program is expected to lose about 70,000 of its roughly 1 million slots due to sequestration. Those cuts have already hit children in Indiana, where Head Start programs in two towns resorted to a lottery system in March to determine which kids could remain. Other Head Start programs 2014 such as one in Passaic County, N.J., that expects to lose about $200,000 of its roughly $4 million in federal funding 2014 won’t have to wrestle with cuts until the fall.
Sequestration is also hitting schools on Indian reservations, where federal funds can make up 60 percent of a school’s budget. The Fort Peck Indian reservation in Montana “can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level,” according to the Washington Post. Summer school may be cancelled. And the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota 2014 where a shooting at the high school left seven people dead in 2005 2014 has cut its security staff, as well as course offerings and support staff, in response to sequestration.
Scientific Research: The sequester has also hacked away at funding for scientific research. The National Science Foundation expects to make 1,000 fewer grants this year. Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., will admit fewer science and engineering graduate students. And the directors of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories expect that the “drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years.” More than 50 Nobel laureates have signed a letter protesting the cuts, which Hunter R. Rawlings III, the president of the Association of American Universities, has also decried. “To put it kindly, this is an irrational approach to deficit reduction,” he told a Senate committee in February. “To put it not so kindly, it is just plain stupid.”
Court System: Sequestration has cut the federal judiciary’s budget by almost $350 million for the 2013 fiscal year, which is already half over. In Massachusetts, public defenders will have to take 16½ furlough days 2014 which could lead to a backlog in the court system 2014 and funding for drug and mental health services will be cut by 20 percent. In Dallas, the public defender’s office will shut down every Friday for the next six months.
And in New York, public defenders representing Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a former Al Qaeda spokesman and a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden charged with conspiring to kill Americans, requested this week that a federal judge push back the trial date because of furloughs in their office. “It’s extremely troublesome to contemplate the possibility of a case of this nature being delayed because of sequestration,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday. “Let me say only that 2014 stunning.”
Wow. Has anybody beaten sequestration?
Yes. Weeks before the sequester hit, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack started describing how his department would have to furlough meat inspectors if the cuts went through, forcing meat-processing plants to shut down on furlough days. His talk convinced the meat inspectors’ union and other industry heavyweights to start lobbying. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation went to work, and the Senate ended up moving $55 million from other Agriculture Department programs to the inspectors.
While the overall warming is about 0.16°C per decade, there are three ten-year periods where there was a hiatus in warming, as the graph above shows, from 1977 to 1986, from 1987 to 1996, and from 2001 to 2012. But at each end of these periods there were big jumps. We find exactly the same [...] […]
Following CAP’s piece yesterday that details exactly what it means to use gasoline to travel this Memorial Day weekend, here is an infographic that shows the cost of Big Oil. Gas prices are rising in the Midwest and spot crude oil prices for the West Texas Intermediate benchmark is nearly $5 per barrel higher than [...] […]
Shiva Polefka is a Research Associate for Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress where Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy. Yesterday Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, revealed newfound support for oil and gas exploration off the Commonwealth’s coast. The Washington Post reported that he now backs legislat […]
Two of Alaska's most active volcanoes -- Pavlof and Cleveland -- are currently erupting. At the time of this post, their activity continues at low levels, but energetic explosions could occur without warning. Located close to the western end of the Alaska Peninsula, Pavlof is one of the most active volcanoes in the Aleutian arc, having erupted more than […]
In its 2013 Atlantic hurricane season outlook issued today, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is forecasting an active or extremely active season this year. […]
Most modern human mothers wean their babies much earlier than our closest primate relatives. But what about our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals? A team of U.S. and Australian researchers reports that they can now use fossil teeth to calculate when a Neanderthal baby was weaned. The new technique is based in part on knowledge gained from studies of teeth […]
