A recent article on the public interest news site ProPublica details “Everything We Know About What’s Happening Under Sequestration,” including an approachable Q&A section detailing its major components and effects thus far, and public statements from a variety of stakeholders.
From the article:
So what’s happened since March 1?
The indiscriminate cuts affected a wide range of federal programs and departments, making them difficult to track. (Even the White House struggled to explain exactly which programs they’d hit while it was denouncing them.) Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters Feb. 28 that sequestration would have “a rolling impact, an effect that will build and build and build.”
Congress passed a bill, signed by Obama on March 26, to spare a few programs from cuts this year, including an infant nutrition program, the nuclear weapons program and funding for security at U.S. embassies abroad — a sensitive area since the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The bill also gave some agencies, including the Pentagon, more flexibility in carrying out the sequester. And last week, Congress quickly passed (and Obama signed) a bill allowing the F.A.A. to scrap its furloughs of air traffic controllers, which had been blamed for long flight delays. But neither bill reduced the total amount the government is required to cut — $85 billion, or about 2.3 percent of the $3.6 trillion federal budget — by the end of the fiscal year in October.