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3/3: The 32 Dumbest and Most Devastating Sequester Cuts
The 32 Dumbest and Most Devastating Sequester Cuts
March 3, 2013
Think Progress / By Igor Volsky [1]
With Congress unable to reach a deal to avert the indiscriminate spending cuts put in place in the Budget Control Act of 2011, President Obama on Friday signed an order authorizing the government to begin canceling $85 billion from federal accounts for this fiscal year.
As Obama said during a press conference yesterday, “This is not going to be a apocalypse, I think as some people have said. It’s just dumb [2]. And it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt individual people and it’s going to hurt the economy overall.” In a 83-page letter [3] to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), the Office of Management and Budget details the specific reductions each government program will face. Here are the dumbest and most painful cuts: Health care $20 million cut from the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs Housing $199 million cut from public housing Disaster and Emergency $928 million cut from FEMA’s disaster relief money Obamacare $13 million cut from the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan Program (Co-ops) Education $633 million cut from the Department of Education’s Special Education programs Immigration $512 million cut from Customs and Border Protection Security $79 million cut from Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance
The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that the nation’s deficits have shrunk by trillions of dollars [8], and the debt is close to being stabilized as a percentage of the economy. Meanwhile, budget cuts have already reduced spending by $1.5 trillion and even with the revenue included in the fiscal cliff deal, the ratio of cuts to revenue stands at an unbalanced 3 to 1 [9].
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