Nobody seems to really know what it is or where it came from. It was never supposed to be like this. Both political parties say the other side started it, that they were dragged along helplessly as federal expenditures were held hostage. For a while it looked like both parties in the House were going to come to a deal, but ideological hard-liners blocked any chance at meaningful negotiation and, in the process, slashed spending on student work-study programs. Tens of thousands of students may lose the very thing that pays for their college education.
On Friday, March 1, President Obama signed the executive order implementing the sequestration cuts mandated by law. He has ordered the federal bureaucracy to cut its budget by almost one trillion dollars, in line with the report of the Office of Management and Budget to Congress. Everyone seems to agree that this was a terrible idea. Few—if any—lawmakers stand behind the sequestration. Two questions immediately come to mind: Who let this happen? and How will this affect me?
In the 2011 fights over raising the debt ceiling, lawmakers agreed to cut trillions of dollars. Roughly half of that was approved through legislative action; the rest was supposed to be imposed through a bipartisan committee.
Because the committee failed to reach a deal, Congress installed a kind of budgetary “dead man’s hand” to force a compromise between the two parties. When they failed to reach a deal by March 1, the budget officially underwent sequestration, rapidly reducing the resources of each of the federal agencies. Cuts range as far as defense cuts to cuts in the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Education is no exception.
In his testimony before Congress on Feb. 14, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “80 percent of school districts would not be able to make up the funding lost to sequestration.”
While important programs like Pell Grants were shielded from the sequestration, the cuts will still target the processings of FAFSAs. In his testimony, Duncan went on to note that the delay in processings could mean “students […] could experience delays in the processing and origination of federal student loans.”
Because of this, students may not know what kind of federal aid they will be getting before they commit to a specific university. High school seniors may be forced to take a gamble on whether or not they can afford to attend one college over another making planning for education even more difficult than it already is. Duncan has elsewhere been absolutely opposed to sequestration efforts, calling them “economically foolish and morally indefensible.”
Beyond just cuts to loan procesing, there will be new budget constraints; the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities would all face flat 7.6 percent mandatory spending cuts, as well as additional cuts to discretionary spending.
Beyond being merely outraged that these cuts were allowed to go into effect, I’m astounded that we even got to this point.
The sequester almost perfectly proves the existential absurdists right. Congress and the White House agreed to these spending cuts, and then they claim that there’s nothing they can do about them? Both branches literally made up this problem, agreed to the sequestration so that they could force each other to a make deal, then claim that it’s impossible to come to compromise, and so now we must accept the sequestration because each branch claims there is nothing they can do about it.
What was President Obama thinking? Why did he ever think that the House of Representatives with 232 Republicans and a Speaker like John Boehner (whose been completely unable to control his caucus) would come to a deal? They spent the last two years of his first term doing nothing but trying to repeal health care and make abortion illegal again. Had President Obama thought they had some kind of change of heart? That they would suddenly want to work with him?
It’s more than that, though. I’m not really concerned with why President Obama thought that he could make a deal with these people. I’m more concerned with a certain logic that’s been at play on both sides of the aisle throughout this debate. Lawmakers from both sides of Congress agreed to hold not only the entire federal budget hostage for political posturing, but in doing so they took the American people hostage as well.
I think this applies most to students at any level of education. As a young population without much money, we lack any strong lobbyists in Congress and have few who represent us—defense, big oil and coal, banks and much of society at large have strong voices speaking to Congress. We did not have a voice at the negotiating table; we had the Secretary of Education, but he has not actually been in school for years.
Holding us hostage is indefensible. Thousands of students may have to switch to part-time enrollment, or worse, drop out of school. People have been far too apathetic about this: if this were France, Greece or even the United Kingdom, students would be out in the streets, rioting, blocking cars, making chaos. But what are we doing here on our own campus? Sitting neatly in the library, studying for our midterms, positive that none of this will actually affect us, convinced that none of this is actually real.
Why are students in the United States so apathetic about their own education? Why have we not seen a massive student uprising, or even protest, comparable to anything thats happened around colleges in England, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, or Italy? The May 1968 uprisings in Paris are rarely spoken of even here.
I’m not saying that violent rioting is good; I think we can all agree that with the demise of Occupy Oakland that sort of political strategy is no longer effective. I just think it’s important to consider why students in this country are so rarely consulted on their wishes, why politicians are able to routinely and systematically ignore the wishes of students, and why we don’t do anything about it.
Maybe we can’t do anything about the sequester. Maybe all we really can do at this point is laugh at this budgetary Myth of Sisyphus, and cringe when the fiscal boulder at the top of the mountain falls and our “elected representatives” try in vain to push it to the top once again.