Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter told the House Armed Services Committee recently that the Pentagon probably would release temporary employees and impose a partial hiring freeze or unpaid furloughs if sequestration is imposed.
A critical factor in determining how sequestration would play out will be whether the administration allows the cuts to be imposed blindly across all federal activities or whether more exemptions will be established.
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“That is a real question,” said Max Stier, president and executive director of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. “Will they go with an across-the-board haircut or protect higher-priority programs?”
A July 25 report prepared by the Senate Appropriations Committee majority staff for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) warned that sequestration “would have destructive impacts on the whole array of Federal activities,” among them education, job training, medical research, child care, worker safety, food safety, national parks, border security and air travel.
Stier said uncertainty over sequestration has already harmed the effectiveness of federal workers.
“It presents a real dilemma to the federal workforce in terms of doing their planning, with people wondering: Will they have a job? Will they have the same colleagues?” he said. “Uncertainty is not a good thing in the workplace.”
“If the end goal is to reduce the cost of government, we’re choosing a bad way to do it,” Stier said. “The process itself is hurting good government.”
Former Virginia governor Timothy M. Kaine, the state’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, told a political forum in Arlington County this month that “feds feel like they’re being attacked” on sequestration.
Barbara Jackson, a 43-year employee of the Social Security Administration, said the situation is more alarming than during the 1995 government shutdown. “Back then, I wasn’t as worried about a furlough because the economy was better,” said Jackson, who attended the forum along with her colleague Lynnette Rodgers. “Now, in essence, we have the biggest recession since the Great Depression.”
Jackson said she is most concerned about younger federal workers, many of whom “are saddled with student loans.”
Betty Coll, an employee at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a former chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union, expressed unhappiness with the criticism that federal employees receive from legislators.
“Federal employees need friends on Capitol Hill,” she said, adding that the rhetoric “drowns out the good work federal employees do.”
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