After the 'sequester,' now what?

$85 billion in across-the-board cuts to defense and social programs took effect March 1. The cuts must occur this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Here's how things look.

5. Q: Meanwhile, do government agencies have any flexibility as to what they must cut?

Some, yes. Spending by each federal department is guided by appropriations laws, which often provide a degree of leeway to transfer modest amounts of money from one department "account" to another. For the Department of Defense, for example, there's an account for Army "missile procurement" but there's another for Army "ammunition."

A second form of wiggle room is to "reprogram" within an account. Agencies can move money from one activity or project to another – even though the sequester in theory hits each activity to the same degree. The Army could, for example, spend more on one kind of helicopter and less on another in its "aircraft procurement" account.

But the flexibility goes only so far. Transfers among accounts are rare, and reprogramming doesn't accomplish much in a budget account in which the lion's share of money is already spent on one thing.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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