This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Federal prison guard Donny Boyte was sitting in the lobby of the DoubleTree hotel at Westport Plaza Thursday morning talking about the dangers that he believed sequestration posed for employees of the Bureau of Prisons.
Boyte, 44, voiced serious concerns over unpaid furloughs that he felt would compromise the safety of the 125 guards he works with at the federal penitentiary in El Reno, Okla. The prison houses 1,200 inmates, including murderers, rapists, drug traffickers and members of notorious crime gangs from all over the world.
"We were already short-staffed and underfunded. As a union we’ve been fighting for better funding and personal protective equipment to make the job safer,’’ said Boyte who explained that federal prison guards are not armed.
"Right now, the only thing we have to protect ourselves is each other. And when you don’t have somebody that can come and help you fight off an attack you’re most likely going to get seriously hurt or killed,’’ he said.
Boyte was in St. Louis to attend a training session for union leaders of District 9 of the American Federation of Government Employees, which includes Missouri. The union represents more than 650,000 federal workers and has been holding rallies to raise awareness about the impact of unpaid furloughs on public employees, their families and local economies. About 1 million federal employees face one-day-a-week unpaid leaves of 22 weeks, amounting to a 20 percent pay cut.
"Leave us alone. We do a good job,’’ said Boyte, the president of the local AFGE chapter that represents the prison in El Reno and a prison transfer station in Oklahoma City.
Boyte’s concerns over safety were affirmed the next day when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he had reallocated $150 million in Justice Department funds to avoid the daily furloughing of 3,570 federal prison staffers each day. The bureau houses 176,000 inmates at 119 institutions around the country.
In a memo to department employees, Holder noted that he was “deeply troubled by the impact the sequester will have on the department's capacity to prevent terrorism, combat violent crime, partner with states and local law enforcement agencies and protect the judiciary and our most vulnerable citizens."
While Boyte was pleased, he warned that Holder’s actions hadn’t solved the bureau’s problems. "Everybody's ecstatic, but it didn't eliminate us from the sequestration. We're still about $50 million short of what we need to operate the prisons," he told an Oklahoma City TV station.
All cuts are not equal
And so it goes with sequestration, the process that automatically cuts $85 billion from the federal budget, half of it from defense programs and half from domestic programs.
Three weeks after the sequestration ax fell, it remains unclear how the budget reductions will affect life in these United States for the remainder of this fiscal year, which runs through September.
What has become clear is this: Not all spending reductions are viewed equally.
There was, for example, a very public outcry against the decision by the U.S. armed forces to suspend military tuition assistance as part of Department of Defense cuts. Within a week of its posting on the White House website, a petition to reinstate the funding had reached the 100,000 signatures needed to prompt an official response from the administration of President Barack Obama.
That issue was apparently resolved -- at least for now -- when Congress on Thursday approved a stop-gap appropriations bill to keep the government operating through September. Included was an amendment instructing the armed services to restore the tuition funding.
Included in that same budget bill was a reallocation of $55 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture funds to keep federal food inspectors from being furloughed. That amendmentwas co-sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt R-Mo.
Glenn Koenen, an advocate for food programs that assist low-income St. Louisans, said the public response to protect certain programs isn’t surprising.
“When you sit down to dinner you want to make sure your meat is not going to kill you,’’ he said. “The old joke is that the perfect tax is the one I don’t pay. And a lot of this is the perfect cut is the one that doesn’t affect me.’’
Koenen is concerned about the fairness of the budget reductions and he fears they will harm programs that assist low-income Americans because they tend to be easier targets.
“I get the sense that people are becoming more accepting of the idea that government doesn’t have any responsibility -- taxpayers don’t have any responsibility -- for taking care of the less fortunate, be they senior citizens or kids or the working poor,’’ he said. "And with today’s economy we’re looking at more people stuck in poverty their whole entire working lives.’’
He fears that people will accept temporary cuts to vital programs as inevitable and begin to think that the programs aren’t needed as much as they used to be.
Koenen finds nothing positive about the sequestration process.
"We’re trying to avoid having this big discussion -- or argument -- about what is important, what our priorities are. Instead, we keep trying to nickel and dime it,’’ he said.
The good, the bad, the sequester
Even as federal agencies were still figuring out how where and how to make the cuts, the majority of Americans remained unsure about whether sequestration would be a good or bad thing. According to a Gallup survey, 55 percent of respondents said they didn’t know enough to judge, and 60 percent said they didn’t know if the impact would be good or bad for them personally.
"The sequester” was first included by Congress in the Budget Control Act of 2011 to encourage compromise on deficit reduction efforts. On Jan. 2, Congress passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act, temporarily halting the mandatory cuts. They went into effect on March 1 after the nation’s lawmakers still couldn’t agree on a budget.
"The reason we have the sequester is because they couldn’t agree on a plan. So they took the worst possible alternative, thinking that no one would ever let it happen,’’ Koenen said.
Even some critics of big government spending would agree that sequestration isn’t the optimal solution to hacking away at the nation’s $16 trillion debt.
Rik Hafer, a scholar at the Show-Me Institute, said in a commentary for the St. Louis Beacon that sequestration is a "clumsy tool” but that it represents an opportunity to reduce the expansion of government and make it more cost-effective. Hafer noted that the $85 billion in government cuts amounted to less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
"Even after the reduction, federal outlays remain nearly 25 percent of GDP, a level greater than its pre-recession level and its historical average,’’ wrote Hafer, who is an economics professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
"The sequestration thus makes a small dent in the massive run-up in government spending that has taken place,’’ he said. “Even before the recession, growth in government spending outpaced that of the economy. The massive buildup in spending related to the recession only accentuated the trend.’’
Hafer cited an argument by Stanford University economist John Taylor that the negative economic impact of sequestration could be reduced by giving government agencies the flexibility to make their own cuts within their budgets.
Boyte, who has worked for the Bureau of Prisons for 24 years, said the proposed furloughs -- 14 days of unpaid leave -- would have not only endangered the safety of prison personnel but also harmed them financially. Like other federal employees, their pay has been frozen for three years. The pay scale for federal guards starts at about $33,000 a year and tops out at about $60,000.
Boyte said he understands that salaries are often the biggest expense and the easiest cuts to make for most federal programs, but he believes Congress doesn’t recognize the urgency of the current situation.
"We’ve been cut for three years now with pay freezes. Budgets have been cut. It has done nothing for the national debt,’’ he said. “The federal employee has been so demonized by the media, by political parties, that the general public is not pressing Congress to do something.’’
Boyte said that Americans tend to take important government services for granted.
"The border patrol. Social Security. The Corps of Engineers. Food inspectors. Air traffic controllers. Every agency has a purpose to the public, and we as a union are going to have to educate the public about it,’’ he said.
Funders of freedom?
Jackson Nickerson, a professor of strategy at Washington University’s Olin Business School, says that negative public perceptions about federal workers have made them low hanging fruit and popular targets for budget cuts.
"In effect, it gives the politicians the political will to create something like sequestration in the first place, as opposed to doing the heavy lifting of finding ways of making sure that Medicare and Social Security will survive,’’ he said.
Nickerson, who is also a non-resident senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, runs a program aimed at training federal government leaders.
"People are working for federal agencies because they believe in their work,’’ he said. “But no one recognizes that anymore. Not the American public. Not the Congress. Occasionally, not the president.’’
He said that part of the problem is that the public doesn’t understand how government works, expecting it to operate like private businesses run by a leader – a chief executive office or president.
"But in the government you have all these senators and all these congressmen -- and the president -- and when you work in an agency you are, in essence, reporting to all of them,’’ he said.
That many bosses creates constraints, as does the fact that agencies function under legal authorities prescribed by Congress that define what workers can and cannot do.
"The CEO of a for-profit business can decide today that we’re going to reorganize and start reorganization tomorrow. In the federal government it will take you at least two years to reorganize the authorities provided to you,’’ Nickerson said.
At the same time, the public expects the government to be as adaptive and responsive as private business, he said.
"Unfortunately, we blame our public servants -- people who have chosen to dedicate their lives and careers in service of us,’’ Nickerson said. “But because of all these constraints, often they can’t do what they’ve been asked to do. What seems to be common sense. It’s unfortunate and frankly unfair that we the people blame them for a set of government services that don’t seem to adapt fast enough to the changing needs of the American people.’’
Nickerson said that Americans focused on cutting Big Government tend to view government -- and government employees -- in a negative way.
"We don’t think of the IRS as the funder of freedom. We think of the IRS as taking our money,’’ Nickerson said. “But a different perspective is that the IRS funds our freedoms. It collects the money that we use to defend ourselves. To give us justice in the court system. To fund the CIA, FBI or military. It funds the National Labor Relations Board. It funds the EPA. Of course, it funds it with our money.’’
Nickerson said that the politicians who campaign on cutting government often want to keep their fingers in the pie to protect their own interests.
"They necessarily will be slow and deliberate in deciding how and when to reorganize, and they’re not going to reorganize if it’s against their perceived best interests, ‘’ he said.
Nickerson is concerned that sequestration could hasten the retirement of federal workers, particularly in leadership positions. He warns that there isn’t a good pipeline for replacing them.
"Over the next five years, we could lose competency and capability, which is going to make government even more inefficient. As the economy gets better an increasing number of capable people will leave government for the private sector,’’ he said.
