"The Congressional Budget Office estimates sequestration will cost around 750,000 jobs in total,
and forecasters think it could reduce economic growth by half a percentage point this year."
It sounds like a new accounting trick with bipartisan backing to make all the cuts they couldn't make via the normal budgetary process....
http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-whats-happened-under-sequestration/single#republish
Education:
The federally funded Head Start early education program is expected to lose around 70,000 of its roughly 1 million slots due to sequestration. Those cuts have already hit children in Indiana, where Head Start programs in two towns resorted to a lottery system in March to determine which kids could remain. A Head Start program in Birmingham, Ala., will shut down for 10 weeks this summer, and one in Pejebscot, Maine, will close for good. Other Head Start programs — such as one in Passaic County, N.J., that expects to lose about $200,000 of its roughly $4 million in federal funding — won’t have to wrestle with cuts until the fall. A program in Colorado Springs faced with cutting 142 spots this fall had children decorate empty chairs that it has sold for $500 apiece to raise money. It has saved two spots so far.
The Head Start cuts have come even as the president called for a massive expansion of preschool.
Sequestration is also hitting schools on Indian reservations, where federal funds can make up 60 percent of a school’s budget. The Fort Peck Indian reservation in Montana “can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level,” according to the Washington Post. Summer school may be cancelled. And the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota — where a shooting at the high school left seven people dead in 2005 — has cut its security staff, as well as course offerings and support staff, in response to sequestration.
Scientific Research:
The sequester has also hacked away at funding for scientific research. The National Science Foundation expects to make 1,000 fewer grants this year. Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., will admit fewer science and engineering graduate students. And the directors of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories expect that the “drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years.”
More than 50 Nobel laureates have signed a letter protesting the cuts, which Hunter R. Rawlings III, the president of the Association of American Universities, has also decried. “To put it kindly, this is an irrational approach to deficit reduction,” he told a Senate committee in February. “To put it not so kindly, it is just plain stupid.”
And the Massachusetts public defender’s office, which is representing Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, still has to deal with furloughs. "No one knows exactly how it will affect things," a federal court official told ABC News.
Wow. Anything else?
Sequestration has led a number of states to cut their emergency unemployment benefits. Programs designed to help victims of domestic violence have had their funding slashed. And less federal funding has meant to cuts to Meals on Wheels programs in places such as Roanoke, Va, which recently started a waiting list. "We've never had a waiting list," Michele Daley, the director of nutrition services at the Local Office on Aging, which administers Meals on Wheels in four Virginia counties, told the Huffington Post. "This is the first time ever and it's a direct result of sequestration."
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