“Sequestration,” that arcane budget term consuming Washington in recent weeks, is about to move from political abstraction to objective reality for tens of millions of Americans. Barring an extremely unlikely last-minute deal, about $85 billion is set to be cut from military, domestic and certain health care programs beginning Friday.

Much of the government will be immune, only magnifying the cuts for the rest. If they are not reversed, federal spending at the discretion of Congress will eventually fall to a new five-decade low. Cuts of even larger size are scheduled to take effect every year over the next 10, signaling an era of government austerity.

By the end of this week, federal agencies will notify governors, private contractors, grant recipients and other stakeholders of the dollars they would be about to lose. As of March 1, the Treasury Department will immediately trim subsidies for clean energy projects, school construction, state and local infrastructure projects and some small-business health insurance subsidies.

Nearly two million people who have been out of work for more than six months could see unemployment payments drop by 11 percent in checks that arrive in late March or the first days of April, according to the White House budget office, an average of $132 a month. Doctors who treat Medicare patients will see cuts to their reimbursements.

If the stalemate in Washington continues, furloughs and layoffs will probably begin in April, starting largely in the 800,000-member civilian work force of the Defense Department and then rippling across the country, from meat inspectors in Iowa to teachers in rural New Mexico.

“If they hit me with a $3 million cut in March, I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” said Raymond R. Arsenault, the superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools, a district that serves primarily Navajo students on the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Mr. Arsenault’s school system would be hit much harder than most because 35 percent of his $100 million annual budget comes from federal education “impact aid” to offset the large tracts of land that are owned by Washington and therefore not subject to taxation. Of that, $3 million may be about to disappear.

The sequester involves trimming $85 billion from a $3.6 trillion annual federal budget, or about 2.4 percent. But the cuts will not affect Social Security or Medicaid, and the Medicare cuts total only about $11 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, according to calculations by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Thus, entitlement spending, which poses the biggest long-term challenge to the federal budget, accounts for only a sliver of the cuts. That leaves more than $70 billion in cuts to be applied over the next seven months to the roughly two-fifths of the budget that is devoted to discretionary spending, including the military, education and dozens of other categories.

In a matter of weeks the cuts would cascade through the government, delaying snow removal on the Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park, for example, and keeping an aircraft carrier battle group docked in Norfolk, Va., rather than steaming through the Persian Gulf.

“The cut is so big and over such a short period of time that there’s no way to avoid all the operational and program harms,” said Daniel I. Werfel, controller of the White House budget office.

These cuts would probably not be confined to 2013. Even if President Obama manages to persuade Congress to raise new revenue, he has said he would replace only half of the spending cuts with tax increases, in essence accepting a half-trillion dollars in cuts over 10 years. That would be on top of more than $1 trillion in cuts already enacted by the Budget Control Act, which created the sequester in 2011 as part of a deal to raise the country’s statutory borrowing limit.

A comprehensive deficit-reduction deal, which is currently moribund but is still both Congress and the White House’s stated goal, might mitigate the impact by including fast-growing programs like Medicare and Medicaid in the cuts. But belt-tightening, for now, appears to be the new normal.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/us/politics/hard-budget-realities-as-agencies-prepare-to-detail-reductions.html?partner=rss&emc=rss