Sequester Leads to Creative Stopgap Measures

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Hayley Harris, left, helping Aubrie Bacio paint chairs for the "Fill a Seat" fund-raiser for a Head Start program in Colorado Springs. Sales of the $500 chairs have filled just two slots.

Facing the task of cutting 142 children from the Head Start program in Colorado Springs this fall, the teachers and administrators came up with a creative response: Have the children decorate empty chairs, then sell them for $500 apiece to stave off the worst of the across-the-board federal cuts heading their way. So far, in a month, their "Fill a Seat" fund-raiser has filled just two slots in the program.

But in neighboring Wyoming, the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks were able to tap the deep pockets and political influence of affluent donors and the support of neighboring communities to maintain full park operations through the peak tourist season this summer.

The $85 billion in federal budget cuts known as sequestration are beginning to be felt far from the nation's capital, like at a Head Start program in Pejepscot, Me., that is being closed and a cancer center in Birmingham, Ala., that is looking at layoffs. Kidney patients are losing their free transportation to dialysis centers in Stark County, Ohio, and flood gauges are being shut down on the Red River in North Dakota.

Some programs are coping, some are struggling and others appear to be out of luck.

Late last month, Sheila Payne, a Head Start director in Texas, drove 85 miles to break the news to workers in the towns of Baird and Ranger: After 16 years, their programs would be shut down. Ten employees would be out of work as of May 1, and 40 children would be staying home.

Some program administrators are resigned to austerity. "At this point, everyone's had enough time to digest that this is a new chapter in our story, and we just have to learn to work with it," said Noreen Landis-Tyson, chief executive of the Community Partnership for Childhood Development, which runs Head Start in El Paso County, Colo. "We have to see this as an opportunity. Otherwise I'd have to sit in the corner and cry."

Not everyone is feeling the pain. Congress delivered a last-minute reprieve last month for air traffic controllers facing layoffs. The only other sequestration fix that may come out of the House in the coming weeks would spare oncologists from a 2 percent cut in reimbursements for chemotherapy.

Not many lawmakers from either party are happy with the incremental fixes.

"Cherry-picking at the sequester is the wrong approach," said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. "The result is some of the most visible problems and some of the most powerful constituents may get relief, but everybody else gets left behind."

Neither party wanted to hurt federal law enforcement, so Congress granted the Justice Department such broad authority to shift money around that furloughs and job cuts once predicted for the Federal Bureau of Investigation have evaporated. Customs and Border Protection had planned staggered furloughs for all 60,000 of its workers. But with new spending flexibility granted by Congress in March, the agency now says it will furlough no one.

An even larger "reprogramming" request is expected in the coming days from the Defense Department, which is absorbing half of the sequestration cuts.

On a much smaller level, the Jenny Lake Visitor Center and Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve in Grand Teton National Park were to be closed all summer because of the cuts — until private donors pitched in $116,000. Now, both will open on time.

Officials at Yellowstone, struggling with pending cuts, had decided to delay opening much of the park until the snow on the roads melted on its own. Then the neighboring towns of Cody and Jackson, Wyo., raised $171,000 to pay for snow-removal crews. The roads to Old Faithful from the west and east opened on schedule, said Al Nash, a park spokesman, and the South Entrance, weather permitting, will open on May 10 — right on time.

But such good-news stories are eclipsed by the bad. Washington appears to have reached its limit in offering assistance, especially for hard-hit social programs. And many recipients of federal money have replaced prayers of hope with efforts to cope.

"Maybe having to go through this pain will let us send a message to legislators down the line, 'You know, you have to find something else that doesn't do this much damage,' " said Carl Rosenkranz, the longtime executive director of the Ozarks Area Community Action Corporation in southwest Missouri, which is cutting 185 slots from Head Start and 14 from Early Start, a separate program for infants. "The sequester cuts are real."

At issue for programs like Head Start, which is financed by the Department of Health and Human Services, is politics — specifically the politics of President Obama's health care law. Congressional Republicans have refused to grant the same kind of latitude to the department's secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, that they have given to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. for fear that she will use it to increase financing to carry out the Affordable Care Act, Republican aides say.

Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, have renewed a push to grant the administration broad latitude to move money around to mitigate the cuts, but they have met stiff resistance in both parties.

Republicans say the shifts would be tantamount to Congress' relinquishing its constitutional power to designate what programs are financed at what levels. Democrats are split between those who continue to oppose a broad sequestration fix unless it includes some revenue increases and those who say it is time to give up and mitigate the damage as best they can.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the amounts by which federal spending on some programs had fallen between 2011 and 2012, before the sequestration cuts began. Spending on health care services, research and training dropped by $25 billion, not $25 million, while spending on housing, food, nutrition and other income assistance programs fell by $28 billion, not $28 million. Also, a photo caption with this article misstated information about a fund-raiser by a Head Start program in Colorado Springs. The fund-raiser filled two slots for children; it did not sell two chairs.

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