The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape coming from the Obama administration have been alarming, specific — and, in at least some cases, hyped.
Take the claim by Education Secretary Arne Duncan that there are “literally teachers now who are getting pink slips.”
When he was pressed in a White House briefing Wednesday to name an example, Duncan came up with one school district, in West Virginia, and he acknowledged, “Whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know.”
As it turns out, it isn’t. What Kanawha County is actually doing is sending transfer notices to 104 educators in response to an unrelated change in the way federal dollars are allocated.
“It’s not like we’re cutting people’s jobs at this point,” said Pam Padon, who administers the county’s federal aid for poor students. “This is not due to sequestration.”
Despite the reams of fact sheets the White House has been putting out, no one really knows how bad things are likely to get — including Republicans who have criticized the president for exaggerating the effects.
Simple arithmetic can show the impact on some programs — the checks the federal government sends to unemployed people will be smaller, for instance.
But many of the reductions, such as those in education spending, will not be felt for months in most school systems, which gives individual districts some time to make adjustments and allowances for the lost funds.
That means the administration’s dire projection that “as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs” is guesswork at best; most school districts will not start sending out layoff notices for the next school year until around May.
State and local governments could also shift money around to blunt the impact on some popular programs such as Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to homebound elderly people and is funded with flexible federal grant money.
And some of the scariest scenarios — say, concerns that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which stands to lose more than $300 million, will not have the resources it needs to spot and contain the next deadly disease outbreak — are by their nature impossible to quantify.
“The threats aren’t decreasing,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden. “I can’t predict when an outbreak is going to happen.”
While the country has lived through five temporary government shutdowns since 1981, “we actually haven’t had something quite like this before,” said David Kamin, formerly special assistant to the president for economic policy in the Obama White House and now a New York University law professor. “We’ve never had an across-the-board cut of this magnitude applied.”
What is not new, however, is the impulse of officials to resort to melodrama when they are faced with budget cuts. Getting people’s attention has been a challenge in the case of the sequester. In the latest Washington Post-Pew Research Center survey, only one in four said they were closely following news about the automatic spending cuts.
The ploy even has a name: the “Washington Monument” syndrome, a reference to the National Park Service’s decision to close that landmark and the Grand Canyon for two days a week after the Nixon administration cut funding in 1969.
