Coming soon to the FBI?
The FBI might have to take drastic action
if sequestration continues, furloughing workers for 10 or more days and actually closing offices on furlough days. It's a reminder that agencies have so far dealt with sequester by making one-time cuts:
The FBI avoided unpaid leave during the current fiscal year in part with one-time reductions that largely involved contract reductions. But the agency can’t repeat those moves while reaching its $700 million cost-cutting target for the next cycle.
“You can’t get there in the same way,” the FBI official said.
The FBI is not alone in this; other agencies have had to defer maintenance and delay tasks that will need to be done in the long term. While Republicans have tended to claim that visible effects of the cuts were Obama administration showboating and that invisible effects don't really exist, in fact, something like the reverse is true, with agencies and workers trying hard to put off the inevitable consequences of indiscriminate budget cuts. As one federal worker
said over the summer, "we’ll be damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If we avoid any big problems, then it looks like, ‘oh, five percent cut, no big deal,’ but if the problems do occur, there will be the casting of blame."
In this, sequestration is just one more instrument of the longstanding Republican strategy of breaking government, then running against government because it's broken.