Sequester Begins With Devastating Spending Cuts

The automatic reductions of $85 billion in federal spending, known as the Sequester, which were agreed to by President Obama, Senate Democrats and House Republicans when the Budget Control Act was passed and signed into law in 2011, started going into effect today, March 1.  As President Obama has warned over the past several weeks, the consequences of cutting federal spending by 2.2 percent already are calamitous.  Bloomberg News reported that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was going to have to discontinue its survey of green jobs.

Here’s what Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the ironically named Center for American Progress and the author of a book on green energy told Bloomberg: “It’s a huge loss.  This means the U.S. will be flying blind on the growth of a very, very important sector in the U.S. economy.”

It may be the White House agrees with my CEI colleague John Berlau, who told Bloomberg that he was glad to see the green jobs survey go.  That’s because President Obama promised in the 2008 campaign his policies would create 5 million new green jobs within a decade.  The White House later claimed $90 billion in stimulus funding had created 225,000 green jobs (at $400,000 per job).  So the president may be happy not to have be reminded by the BLS’s survey of how far he is from keeping his promise.