WASHINGTON — Republicans controlling the House moved Monday to give the Pentagon more money for military readiness while easing the pain felt by such agencies as the FBI and the Border Patrol from the across-the-board spending cuts that are just starting to take effect.
The effort is part of a huge spending measure that would fund day-to-day federal operations through September - and head off a potential government shutdown later this month.
The measure would leave in place automatic cuts of 5 percent to domestic agencies and 7.8 percent to the Pentagon ordered by President Barack Obama on Friday night after months of battling with Republicans over the budget. But the House Republicans’ legislation would award the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments their detailed 2013 budgets while other agencies would be frozen at 2012 levels - and then bear the across-the-board cuts.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, said the spending plan would avert a federal government shutdown when current funding expires March 27. He said it would give the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments more leeway to decide how to spend their money and implement the mandated cuts.
“It is clear that this nation is facing some very hard choices, and it’s up to Congress to pave the way for our financial future,” he said in a statement. “This bill will fund essential federal programs and services, help maintain our national security, and take a potential shutdown off the table.”
The House is set to vote on the measure by Thursday. It would apply the federal spending cuts to the current level of $1.043 trillion in government funding, resulting in an annual spending rate of about $982 billion.
The Pentagon will furlough about 15,000 military school teachers and staff members around the world, but spokesman George Little said Monday the department will manage the process so the schools don’t lose their accreditation.
Little said the military will also close all of the commissaries on bases around the world for one extra day each week. They are currently open six days a week.
The furloughs will occur at schools on military bases around the world that serve the children of military personnel posted there. The teachers and staff members are Defense Department employees.
The furloughs would affect about 8,000 teachers and 7,000 support staff members in the 194 military schools around the world. The schools are located in seven states, a dozen countries, as well as Guam and Puerto Rico, and they serve about 86,000 students. The schools are on military bases in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
Shutting the nearly 250 commissaries worldwide for an additional day per week particularly affects troops stationed abroad who rely on the base stores for their daily living necessities. About 12 million people are authorized to shop in the stores, which see more than $6 billion in transactions annually.
Under the budget cuts, the Pentagon must find $46 billion in savings by the end of the fiscal year. Officials have already said that 800,000 Defense Department civilian workers will be furloughed for one day without pay each week for about 22 weeks.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it will furlough employees for as many as 13 days over the next seven months as the agency complies with automatic U.S. spending cuts.
In a memorandum to staff members late on March 1, acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe said that to meet a reduction of $425 million ordered in the sequestration, the agency will implement furloughs, and cuts in grants and contracts. Staff members will take four unpaid furlough days by June, followed by an assessment to see whether as many as nine additional furlough days are necessary, Perciasepe wrote.
“We anticipate that furloughs will not begin until later in April,” he wrote. “Also, employees will work with their supervisors to schedule furlough days.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the spending cuts were causing delays in customs lines at airports including Los Angeles International and O’Hare International in Chicago.
Obama said he is continuing to seek out Republican partners to reach a deal to ease or head off the cuts, but there is no sign that a breakthrough is in the works to reverse them.
The latest measure would provide an increase for military operations and maintenance efforts as well as veterans’ health programs but would put most of the rest of the government on budget autopilot.
After accounting for the across-the-board cuts, domestic agencies would face reductions that exceed 5 percent when compared with last year. But Republicans would carve out a host of exemptions seeking to protect certain functions, including federal prisons and firefighting efforts in the West, and to provide new funding for embassy security and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The FBI and the Border Patrol would be able to maintain current staffing levels and would not have to furlough employees.
The legislation would provide about $2 billion more than the current level to increase security at U.S. embassies and diplomatic missions worldwide. Last September, a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
A project to repair the Capitol Dome in Washington could stay on track, and NASA would be protected from the harshest effects of the automatic cuts.
Across-the-board cuts would shrink federal spending authority by $85 billion for the budget year through Sept. 30 and total $1.2 trillion over nine years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that actual spending in fiscal 2013 could decrease by just $42 billion because of long-term contracts, which spread spending over several years.
The cuts would be concentrated on the about $1 trillion allocated to the day-to-day agency operating budgets set by Congress each year. Those so-called discretionary accounts received big boosts in the first two years of Obama’s presidency when Democrats controlled Congress but have borne the brunt of the cuts approved as Obama and Republicans have grappled over the budget.
Both Democrats and Republicans for months have warned the cuts are draconian and would slow the growth of the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, for instance, says they would slow the economy by 0.6 percent and cost about 750,000 jobs.
Obama presided Monday over the first meeting of his new-look Cabinet in a sobering climate of fiscal belt-tightening, urging humane management of spending cuts for communities and families that are “going to be hurting.”
“We can manage through it,” the president told reporters. Obama and members of his Cabinet had been warning for weeks that the cuts would be painful, but the fact is they will be slow to take effect, with the first furloughs of government workers not due until next month. Cuts to many programs may go unnoticed entirely.
The White House budget office’s 83-page sequestration order was released Friday evening, detailing the cuts to more than 1,000 separate government accounts, big and small. Cuts of 7.8 percent that are set to strike defense accounts include $5.2 billion for construction at Army bases. Other accounts are far smaller, like $32 million to operate and maintain the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Each agency is supposed to apportion the cuts equally to each “program, project and activity” within the broader accounts, which gives agency heads some flexibility since it’s up to them to define what that means. And it’s not clear what recourse others would have if they disagree with an agency’s choices.
“That leaves it pretty much to the administrators in the agency in which that account falls to determine how he’s planning on applying it,” said G. William Hoagland, a budget expert with the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I don’t know that anybody’s going to be held accountable if some administrator defines a project the way he wants to define it.” Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press; and by Mark Drajem, Roxana Tiron, Derek Wallbank and James Rowley of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/05/2013