National budget cuts deadline looms
Guam - Governor Eddie Calvo continues to make his way through our nation's capital just as the looming deadline for massive automatic federal budget cuts are set to take place. It's still unclear just what impact sequestration will have on Guam, but it's not stopping the island's chief executive from trying to find out as he continues to attend meetings with officials this week in Washington, DC.
"So this is an opportunity under one roof to discuss the issues that are important to Guam and the other territories not only to the representatives of the president but also to the agencies that have major impacts in the territory," Calvo said. He was among various governors and congressional representatives from the insular areas who provided similar remarks while attending the 2013 Senior Plenary Session of the Interagency Group on Insular Areas, hosted by the Department of the Interior on Wednesday. Co-chaired by White House director of intergovernmental affairs David Agnew and deputy secretary of the interior David Hayes, the annual meeting aims to discuss issues of importance to American Samoa, the CNMI, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The governor continued, "There are the issues of sequestration and what those impacts are to the territories. There's an old analogy that is if there's a sneeze in the states it will be pneumonia in the territories and that fact is also relevant for sequestration."
Coincidentally, several of these insular areas including Guam weren't included in a report issued by the White House yesterday that showed the impacts on sequestration to individual states along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia - which aren't states.
Despite Guam being snubbed, a report from the Federal Funds Information for States Database has been updated to reflect new sequestration cut estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO estimates a 5.3% across-the-board cut for domestic discretionary spending and a 5.8% cut for covered mandatory programs.
KUAM News compared the CBO report of programs that will be impacted by sequestration to a list from the Guam State Clearing House that itemizes all locally federally funded programs administered by GovGuam. Programs that could face cuts include Head Start; the Women, Infants and Children program; Education Work Study; violence against women programs; the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program; the Juvenile Accountability Block Grant; the Dislocated Worker Assistance Program, federal funding for vaccines for children, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, funding for Medicaid, child health insurance programs , block grants for substance abuse, mental health, preventive health and maternal and child health.
Speaker Judi Won Pat has also seen the report and while it still remains to be seen if these particular programs will be affected if the automatic budget cuts occur, she says we should be concerned. "So it's definitely going to impact us because we rely heavily on federal monies," she said.
Aside from cuts in federal funding to local agencies, the Department of Defense has confirmed the military buildup for Guam also stands to be impacted significantly.