The Pentagon “might not have enough funds” to pay for its health-care system under automatic spending cuts set to take effect March 1, according to Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter/.../
If the automatic cuts take effect, the military services and defense agencies “will begin laying off a significant portion of our 46,000 temporary and term employees,” Carter said.
The services also are likely to furlough most of the Pentagon’s 800,000 civilian employees one day a week for as long as 22 weeks, resulting in a 20 percent pay cut, Carter said.
The unpaid leave at the Department of Defense would save at most about $5 billion of the $46 billion needed, Carter said/.../
In dollar terms, sequestration wouldn’t cut the Pentagon that deeply, said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. It would cut “roughly 9 percent of the DoD budget, taking it back to the level it was in 2007 when adjusted for inflation,” he said.
The difficulty “is not the magnitude of the cuts but rather the across-the-board manner in which they are applied,” creating “a mess” with the Pentagon forced to furlough civilian employees and default on certain multiyear contracts, Harrison said in an e-mail.
“Congress could avoid much of that mess by simply giving DoD the ability to choose how the cuts are implemented,” Harrison said.