Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
Lacking congressional action to avoid sequestration, the across-the-board spending cuts required under the 2011 Budget Control Act took effect at the beginning of the month.
The federal cuts amount to approximately $42 billion overall in the current fiscal year, including approximately $97.5 million in cuts to programs in Massachusetts that are implemented at the municipal level.
The Massachusetts cuts include $13.9 million from primary and secondary education funding, and an additional $13.4 million in funding for teachers and aides who work with students with disabilities. Head Start will lose $9.6 million in funding, eliminating services for about 1,100 children statewide. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program will face an $11.2 million cut, and Community Development Block Grants will see a $7.2 million cut.
According to the Executive Office of Management and Budget, the sequestration cuts about 5 percent from the annual budgets of non-exempt, non-defense programs. Given that the cuts must be achieved in the remaining months of the fiscal year, however, the effective percentage reduction is more like 9 percent.
Each executive agency is implementing its required cuts on a fluid timeline, and many agencies awaited the late-March passage of a six-month $984 billion continuing resolution to fund the government. The spending levels set by the continuing resolution allows agencies to calculate the exact dollar figures that must be cut from each federal program to comply with the sequestration order. As the cuts are finalized, each municipality or district that receives federal funding will be notified on an agency-by-agency basis of their share of the cuts.
Both the House and Senate passed a version of a federal budget following the passage of the six-month continuing resolution, providing blueprints for future spending and revenue deliberations. Neither budget is expected to win approval from the other body of Congress, however.
The House plan calls for a deficit reduction of $4.6 trillion over 10 years by cutting spending on health care and social programs, while the Senate plan, with a combination of spending cuts and new tax revenue, would achieve a deficit reduction of $1.85 trillion.
The federal government has operated without a budget since 2010, instead relying upon a series of continuing resolutions. While there are statutory requirements that the president release his budget in February and that Congress pass a budget by April 15, there are no real consequences for the failure to do so. The president has indicated that he would not release his budget until the second week of April.