federal policy

What Would Sequestration Mean for the District of Columbia’s Most Vulnerable Residents?

/ The Old Crank / 3 Comments

Yesterday one of our local public radio stations here in the District (WAMU) broadcast a story on the potential local impact of sequestration, the across-the-board federal spending cuts that are set to go into effect in January—unless Congress passes some kind of legislation to avoid it. Right now these cuts are required by a law that this same Congress passed last summer, the Budget Control Act (BCA).

Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, told WAMU that federal spending accounts for roughly 40% of the D.C. metro area’s economy. Federal employees and contractors spend their paychecks here, and so businesses that rely on those dollars (and the housing market) are likely to suffer if that spending is cut back significantly:

“Federal payroll supports a lot of jobs at Giant and Safeway and CVS and other retail establishments,” he says, citing some examples. “There will be fewer high-income households that can afford big houses.  So we could see a rollback on housing values.”

In D.C. itself, the District’s chief financial officer, Natwar Gandhi, told WAMU that federal spending accounts for 60% (!) of the city’s annual economic output. He said that cuts to federal spending would likely result in reduced local tax revenue, which could lead to reductions in services for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

(Fun fact: the legislation that created sequestration was enacted by a Congress in which we do not have a vote, yet it sound like the pain associated with these cuts will likely be more painful here in this city than it will be in other parts of the country.)

Alternatives to sequestration may still include federal workforce reductions and pay freezes, so even if sequestration is scrapped, it’s replacement might not be so great for the local economy either. I recently attended a meeting with some Republican staffers who were still enthusiastically pitching S. 2065, a Senate bill that was introduced in February that would delay the first installment of the sequestration cuts by extending the current federal employee pay freeze though June 2014, and restricting federal hiring to only two employees for every three who leave. While I don’t think this specific bill is going anywhere at the moment, elements of this proposal could make their way into a sequestration-scrapping plan somewhere down the road.

Fuller told WAMU that federal contracting “has been a welfare program for the Washington metropolitan area. Taxpayers around the country send us their money, and we’ve been living well off of this, and now we have to face the music.” Sequestration alternatives that protect this long-standing corporate welfare program via reductions in federal hiring and pay freezes will likely have the same kind of depressive effects on the local economy as the across-the-board cuts required by sequestration.

Responding to Budget Cuts in Adult Education

/ The Old Crank

Last week, the Council for the Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) released In A Time of Scarce Resources: Near Term Priorities in Adult Education, a 34-page summary and analysis of responses submitted by more than two dozen “adult education leaders” about “priority areas in adult education at a time when resources are scarce.” (Not that they are plentiful most of time.) According to CAAL, “the main purpose of the paper is to motivate adult education planners, service providers, and policymakers to recognize the need to focus on highest priority next steps to take in this period of extreme funding constraints.”

Those surveyed, according to CAAL “stress[ed] that we can achieve a great deal, despite stagnant funding, if we set priorities and are all traveling in the same direction toward a comprehensive shared vision for the future.”

But is this true? You can obviously prioritize and work more efficiently to make do with what you have in almost any circumstance, (which is where a report like this one is useful), but I think we let policymakers off the hook when we say that “we can achieve a great deal” when budgets are drastically reduced, as they have been in many states in recent years. People in this field work so hard to figure out how to move forward with scarce resources—in doing so, my fear is that scarce resources are all we are ever going to get.

House and Senate Adult Literacy Resolution Roundup

/ The Old Crank

Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) is introducing a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to recognize the second full week in September as National Adult Education and Family Literacy Week. (As a D.C. resident, I was pleased to see that Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton is a co-sponsor of the resolution.)

If you would like to ask your member of Congress to sign on as a co-sponsor as well, the National Coalition for Literacy (NCL) has all the information you need in order to make that ask. The deadline is tomorrow, July 31st.

In addition, Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) have introduced a similar resolution in the Senate, and are also looking for co-sponsors among their Senate colleagues. For this one, the deadline is Wednesday, August 1st. For some reason, I can’t find this information on the NCL web site, but here is an e-mail NCL sent out last week with some helpful instructions on how to contact your Senator about it:

Senate Alert: Invite Senators to Cosponsor Resolution Dedicating National AEFL Week 2012!

Recently, Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a senate resolution dedicating the week of September 10, 2012 as National Adult Education & Family Literacy Week! Already Jim Webb (D-VA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have signed on as cosponsors to this measure. Would you like your U.S. Senator to support adult education and family literacy by cosponsoring this resolution?

If so, then please call his or her office today, requesting your U.S. Senator sign on as a co-sponsor.  Deadline to co-sponsor: Wednesday, August 1st

Instructions:

  1. Call your U.S. Senator’s office. Ask to speak to the legislative staff who covers adult education. Find the phone number here: http://bit.ly/Senate-AEFLWeek12
  2. Ask, “Will you please ask Senator __________________ to cosponsor a Senate Resolution recognizing the week of September 10 as National Adult Education & Family Literacy Week? The deadline to officially sign on as a cosponsor is August 1.”
  3. To cosponsor, legislative staff should call Jordan Smith on Senator Murray’s staff or Peter Oppenheimer on Senator Alexander’s staff. Offer to send the staffer acopy of the draft resolution.
  4. Talk about why it is important for the Senator to show his/her support as well as the success of local programs and impact of adult education in local communities. While NCL shares the “national picture” with Congress, only you have the local and personal story.
  5. Follow up as appropriate.

Also worth noting: Congressman Hansen Clarke (R) and Tim Scott (D), both of Michigan, introduced a House resolution at the very end of last month “[e]xpressing the sense of the House of Representatives that bolstering literacy among African-American and Hispanic men is an urgent national priority.”

The resolution, if approved, would, among other things, “affirm the goal of reducing adult illiteracy by 50 percent in these target populations and by 25 percent throughout the United States” over the next ten years; encourage local, State, and Federal agencies—as well as the private sector—to engage in “literacy promotion initiatives;” and encourage Federal agencies and private firms to support community-based organization programs and the use of trained volunteers to work with the target populations. (my emphasis).

Congressman Clarke also wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on Friday advocating for increasing resources for adult literacy programs—but without mentioning any specific support for legislation that would actually increase federal funding for adult literacy. Here are his recommendations:

First, rather than reducing school hours and facilities due to budget cuts, we must keep our schools open later and reopen libraries to serve students who are struggling to read. Second, we should boost funding for community-based organizations like Reading Works and ProLiteracy Detroit that provide adult literacy training. Such programs are understaffed and oversubscribed, with 74 percent of organizations nationally maintaining waiting lists. Third, we should reform our prisons to give inmates the tools they need to become successful members of the workforce. We can start to do this by providing more resources to teach literacy in prisons and by rewarding inmates who read more.

Will State TANF Waivers Improve Coordination Between TANF and Adult Education?

/ The Old Crank

(Updated Below)

A couple of weeks ago, the Obama Administration announced that it would begin allowing states to apply for waivers to current TANF rules so that they can “test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.” LaDonna Pavetti of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently wrote a blog post in which she argued that the granting of these waivers, which has apparently annoyed some Republican members of Congress, will strengthen welfare reform. She believes the increased flexibility will permit states to not only design more effective strategies for helping recipients prepare for, find, and retain jobs, but also “measure their accomplishments in more meaningful ways than the current system allows.”

One of her arguments is that waivers will provide states with greater flexibility to align their TANF employment programs with other employment, training, and education initiatives:

The TANF work requirements are very narrowly defined and often are inconsistent with the requirements in other job training and employment programs.  If HHS allows states some flexibility to increase the effectiveness of their TANF work programs and activities, states will be able to maximize coordination among TANF and other programs including the Workforce Investment Act, Adult Education, and Vocational Rehabilitation. This will help to streamline programs and make it easier for unemployed parents to be served by the program best suited to help them secure and retain employment and increase the effectiveness of the bigger employment and training system. (my emphasis)

It will be interesting to see whether any states use this opportunity to improve coordination between TANF and adult education services. It seems to me that this could also be a potential opportunity for adult education advocates and TANF advocates to work together to improve educational opportunities for TANF recipients.

UPDATE 7/30/12:  Greg Kaufman, writing about the proposed waivers in his “This Week in Poverty” blog for The Nation, argues that these waivers represent modest reform only, and argues that what is needed is something more along the lines of Congresswoman Gwen Moore’s RISE Act:

Can you imagine the outcry if there were good, aggressive reforms offered by Democrats—the kind found in Congresswoman Gwen Moore’s RISE Act? Among the smart changes Moore calls for are: adjusting each state’s block grant for inflation so it’s no longer frozen at 1996 funding levels, unchanged for the past 16 years; allowing education and job training to count towards work requirements; providing childcare for all work-eligible parents; and prohibiting time limits of less than 60 months.

Now that would indeed be the end of welfare reform as we know it. Or at least the end of some of its most egregious failures—and the beginning of a system with the interests of poor people at its heart.