Remember those “devastating”
cuts that the government spending reductions ordered by the
sequestration process were supposed to cause? Those cuts, a White
House report said,
would be “deeply destructive” to “core government
functions.”
In a
speech last year, Obama was adamant: The cuts were “not an
abstraction—people will lose their jobs.”
Well, person. At least if you’re talking about the federal
government. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that,
amongst the 23 agencies it examined, exactly one federal employee
was laid off as a result of sequestration.
As the report says in a footnote on page 51: “DOJ officials
reported that one DOJ component—the U.S. Parole
Commission—implemented a reduction in force of one employee to
achieve partial savings required by sequestration in fiscal
year 2013.”
A reporter from FoxNews.com asked federal officials for more
information about the laid off employee, but
didn’t find anything.
Federal agencies did restrict employee travel, training, and
overtime, and also relied on furloughs. But the GAO reports that
most agencies were able to deal with the cuts to at least some
extent by relying on “funding flexibilities”—basically, they
shifted money around, sometimes carrying over money from previous
years, and sometimes taking funds from areas deemed less important
and spending them on prioritized projects and functions. Which
suggests that they were probably oversized and overfunded to begin
with, and could probably withstand some budget trimming.
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