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It’s been six months since Washington, D.C., imposed $85 billion worth of mandatory budget cuts and so far the overall impact has been less than catastrophic.
But the cuts, known as the sequester, have affected some groups more than others and programs that serve the poorest Americans appear to be the hardest hit.
Head Start programs are cutting staff and students. Meals on Wheels, a federal program that delivers meals to the home-bound elderly, is scaling back in some communities. Federal public defenders, already strapped for funding, were forced to cut an additional 11 percent out of their budgets and are preparing for more cuts this fall.
Ohio social service agencies report cuts to programs that serve the very young and the very poor. For example:
- The Ohio Department of Health saw reductions to programs including WIC Food and Newborn Hearing Screening programs. The department has thus far managed to absorb the impact for both those cuts and many others to date.
- Ohioans receiving unemployment benefits saw those benefits reduced by 16 percent, an average of $50 per week.
- According to the Department of Health and Human Services, an estimated 2,782 Ohio preschoolers have been cut from Head Start, a portion of the 57,265 expected to be cut nationwide.
Overall, the impact — while measurable in many cases — has been less sweeping than initially thought.
Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University, originally predicted that the cuts would cost the nation 2.14 million jobs within the first year. “It hasn’t been as bad as expected,” he said.
Fuller said cutting the budget will help the economy in the long run, but the transition could be bumpy. He compared the sequester to losing weight by stopping eating altogether rather than consuming healthier foods.
Disproportionate impact
Part of the reason the cuts weren’t cataclysmic was because Congress and the Obama administration softened the blow. When the nation’s airport security lines became backlogged, for example, Congress quickly passed a bill reducing cuts to the Transportation Safety Administration.
Similarily, when an outcry ensued over the Federal Aviation Administration’s plan to shut down 149 air traffic control towers, the FAA removed that proposal from the table.
Even the most widely publicized cutback — the proposal to furlough some 640,000 civilian Defense Department employees for up to 22 days — had a lessened bite. The number of furlough days was shortened eventually to six.
All told, $110 billion in cuts were reduced to about $85 billion.
But not all federal programs were given a reprieve, and those who work with the disadvantaged say they were unfairly singled out.
“How self-serving can you be?” said Steven Nolder, who headed the public defender’s office covering Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati until the end of June, when he resigned in hopes of preserving other jobs.
Congress, Nolder said, is “willing to fix things that affect them and a large segment of society, but when the target is kids who need Head Start, people who need medical care, people who need legal representation – they’re propping up this hogwash that it saves money, but it doesn’t. All the studies show that if you don’t give disadvantaged kids, at-risk kids early education opportunities, they drop out and end up in prison.”
“Disabuse yourself of the notion that this is saving money,” he said. “It’s not.”
Worst to come?
Others say it could still get worse.
They say that the cuts will be imposed over the next decade, and that many of the agencies affected have already endured years of cuts. You can’t cut from bone, they say, and that’s what the federal government is trying to do, even as it ignores the three growing major entitlements — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which together amount to roughly 64 percent of all federal spending.
“This is something that’s going to be painful over a certain period of time,” said John Leland, director of the University of Dayton Research Institute, which relies on federal dollars in part to pay for its research.
The state has tried to absorb the blow, with both the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Department of Education working to offset cuts with state money. The latter, for example, allocated $19 million to help minimize cuts of $65.7 million this fiscal year.
But, said John Charlton, an education spokesman, “we have not yet discussed how we might help offset federal funding cuts in the future.”
Chuck Gehring, president and CEO of LifeCare Alliance, the largest provider of Meals on Wheels in Central Ohio, said his organization was able to offset initial sequester cuts through private donations. However, by the end of September, he said, they’ll have to cut 5.8 percent more — an amount that will translate to $145,000. The alliance serves Franklin, Madison and Marion counties.
Gehring predicts that as the cuts continue, smaller, more rural counties will be unable to continue to deliver services. Long before the budget cuts kicked in, Meals on Wheels had already faced cuts of between 1 and 5 percent annually over the last decade.
“People think (the cuts) are not a big deal,” Gehring said. “I’m telling you: Programs are going to shut down.”
Meals On Wheels Association of America President and CEO Ellie Hollander said nationally Senior Nutrition Programs such as Meals on Wheels took a $51 million hit in 2013 due to sequestration.
She said her association did a survey in May that found one in six sites were closing service sites or closing their doors altogether. Seventy-three percent are either adding to or creating waiting lists for the first time. Forty percent, she said, are cutting staff.
Congress began the program in the 1960s as part of an attempt to keep older Americans in their homes, rather than have them move into nursing homes on Medicaid dollars. Studies indicate every dollar spent on Meals on Wheels saves $50 that would be spent in Medicaid dollars.
“Are people being impacted? Is it serious?” she says. “The answer is yes, it’s dire. And programs are being devastated.”
Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Twp. in suburban Columbus, said his fellow lawmakers view the cuts’ effect on a sliding scale. Some say it’s been a disaster. Others say it’s not been a problem at all.
He said that all of the initial threats of government programs shutting down that never came to fruition didn’t help the public understand that there is a better way to go about cutting spending.
“The sequester isn’t the answer to our problems,” he said. “We have to have entitlement reform.”
But that’s little solace to Barbara Haxton, executive director of the Ohio Head Start Association. When she thinks about the roughly 2,700 preschoolers knocked off the program by budget cuts, she thinks of how they’ll eventually start school two to three years behind their peers, often heading to failing schools where they’ll never have a chance to catch up.
She worries that eventually those children will end up flunking out of school, going to expensive jails where they’ll cost the government far more than they would’ve had they had a chance to succeed.
All this, for cuts to an $8 billion program — a program that’s a tiny fraction of the $3.8 trillion federal budget.
“This isn’t going to balance the budget by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. “It isn’t as if it’s going to make life better for anybody. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
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