{"id":1392,"date":"2013-04-22T14:58:10","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T20:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=1392"},"modified":"2013-04-22T14:58:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T20:58:45","slug":"sequestration-begins-to-bite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/sequestration-begins-to-bite\/","title":{"rendered":"Sequestration Begins To Bite"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Zeke J Miller<\/a>, Time
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

Sequestration is here \u2014 and it\u2019s hitting the White House hard.<\/p>\n

At the Office of Management and Budget, the executive department charged with managing the sequestration cuts, a total of 480 employees begin furloughs this week. Only a handful of political appointees are exempted. Roughly eight in 10 of the OMB\u2019s staffers are on unpaid furlough today \u2014 and will be every other week until October. The rest will be at home without pay next Monday, an alternating schedule that will continue through the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.<\/p>\n

After seven weeks of worries and doubts, the mandatory budget cuts are starting to be felt across the nation. Flight delays and airport security wait times are up, EPA inspections are being deferred, and even those responsible for setting furlough policy at OMB are themselves being furloughed.<\/p>\n

The Federal Aviation Administration plan to scale back the hours of all of its 47,000 employees \u2014 including 15,000 flight controllers \u2014 kicked in on Sunday, requiring an unpaid day off every two weeks. \u201cYesterday there were approximately 400 delays in the system attributable to staffing reductions resulting from the furlough,\u201d an FAA spokesperson said in a statement to TIME.\u00a0The Department of Defense\u2019s more than 700,000 civilian employees face as many as 14 furlough days beginning in May.<\/p>\n

Employees are prohibited from working during a furlough day even if they want to, and are barred from checking their email for the entire 24-hour period of the furlough day, as well as the preceding Sunday and following Saturday \u2014 because then they would need to be paid.<\/p>\n

The cuts follow dire warnings from the White House in February about the mandatory sequestration cuts, which hit nearly all federal programs and offices across the board. But the administration failed to avert them as Republicans stood firm against raising revenue to achieve the required deficit reduction under the 2011 Budget Control Act, and Obama was accused of crying wolf by Republicans as the March 1 deadline came and went without much of a hiccup.<\/p>\n

But the effects of the cuts are now becoming clear, especially in the nation\u2019s air transit system.<\/p>\n

On Monday morning, Delta\u00a0Airlines<\/a>\u00a0issued an\u00a0advisory<\/a>\u00a0to travelers to expect furlough-driven delays or cancellations in some of the biggest and busiest airports:\u00a0New York<\/a>, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Fort Lauderdale. The airline encouraged customers to contact their members of\u00a0Congress<\/a>\u00a0to urge a change.<\/p>\n

The FAA has postponed the closings of smaller control towers until June from earlier this month, but is experiencing traffic-jams in crowded airspace.<\/p>\n

One symptom of the delays: the Associated Press first reported Monday that the 8 a.m. US Airways shuttle to New York from Washington arrived two-hours late \u2014 and after the 8 a.m. Acela express train.<\/p>\n

Republicans have responded to the flight delays by blasting the Obama administration for furloughing flight controllers, saying the FAA can cut elsewhere \u2014 a position argued by Airlines For America, the industry trade group.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FAA can make other cost cuts, and deem air traffic controllers \u2018essential employees,\u2019\u201d the organization said in a statement on its website geared toward delayed travelers, dontgroundamerica.com.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FAA\u2019s management of sequestration is quickly going from bad to worse,\u201d said House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster\u00a0in a statement, which was tweeted out by Speaker of the House John Boehner with the hashtag \u201c#ObamaFlightDelays.\u201d \u201cGiven that the FAA\u2019s budget increased more than 100 percent over the last 15 years, finding five percent in savings shouldn\u2019t need to significantly impact our nation\u2019s aviation operations.\u00a0 Businesses and families across the country face these issues in their budgets every day without massive impacts.\u00a0 We know that the FAA has the flexibility to reduce costs elsewhere, such as contracts, travel, supplies, and consultants, or to apply furloughs in a manner that better protects the most critical air traffic control facilities.\u00a0 Yet rather than take this approach, the Administration has made choices that appear designed to have the greatest possible impact on the traveling public.\u201d<\/p>\n

But administration officials maintain they have no flexibility with where they can cut. Press Secretary Jay Carney said at the daily press briefing today that sequestration requires the administration to implement cuts across the board and prohibits agencies from shifting money around to keep vital staff on duty.<\/p>\n

Updated at 2:07 p.m. to include FAA statement. The full statement is below:<\/em><\/p>\n

As a result of employee furloughs due to sequestration, the FAA is implementing traffic management initiatives at airports and facilities around the country. Travelers can expect to see a wide range of delays that will change throughout the day depending on staffing and weather related issues. For example, the FAA is experiencing staffing challenges at New York Center and TRACON, Dallas-Fort Worth Center, Jacksonville Center and Los Angeles Center. Controllers will space planes farther apart so they can manage traffic with current staff, which will lead to delays at airports including New York\u2019s La Guardia Airport. The FAA is working with the airlines throughout the day to try and minimize delays for travelers. We encourage all travelers to check their flight status and also to visit\u00a0fly.faa.gov<\/a>\u00a0for the latest airport delay information.<\/p>\n

Yesterday there were approximately 400 delays in the system attributable to staffing reductions resulting from the furlough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Zeke J Miller, Time click here for original article Sequestration is here \u2014 and it\u2019s hitting the White House hard. At the Office of Management and Budget, the executive department charged with managing the sequestration cuts, a total of 480 employees begin furloughs this week. Only a handful of political appointees are exempted. Roughly eight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1392"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1395,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392\/revisions\/1395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}