Congress’ inability to agree on a budget deal last year will potentially trigger $1.2 trillion in cuts in 2013 and devastate many of the federal agencies Capitol Hill relies on to slash spending, two agency chiefs warned yesterday. The Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office said that the cuts would leave the agencies with inadequate staffs called upon more and more by lawmakers looking for paths to slash the federal budget. The GAO, for example, would see staffing at its lowest in its 75 years.
At CBO, which has cut salaries, dumped garage guards and even eliminated newspaper deliveries to meet shrinking federal budgets, the across-the-board cuts would “be very damaging to our organization,” said Director Douglas Elmendorf. Unless Congress figures out a new budget solution, cuts of 8 percent to 9 percent will hit agencies next year, prompting firings, said CBO and GAO.
Hill souring on Twitter archive
It sounds like a joke, but it could cost taxpayers a lot of money, and now Congress is starting to question plans by the Library of Congress to collect the world’s 140-character tweets.
“I just don’t quite understand,” said Rep. Ander Crenshaw, the Florida congressman who chairs the Legislative Branch Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, which would fund the Twitter archive. Not a big Twitter user, he ‘fessed, “I haven’t come across one yet that would warrant storage.”
Twitter has offered its archive to the Library, and James Billington, the librarian of Congress, told a Crenshaw hearing yesterday that he wants them. But he doesn’t want all of the mostly mundane or innocuous thoughts users pop online. “What’s the research value?” asked Billington.
He pledged to keep costs down, but some lawmakers worried about storage. “I can’t even imagine how much space you would need,” said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican. Crenshaw, meanwhile, suggested to Washington Secrets that a college should volunteer to store the tweets.
If the project moves forward, the tweets will likely be part of the public archive, prompting Crenshaw and Emerson to offer some advice to House members. “Be careful what you tweet,” said Crenshaw. “And be careful of your spelling,” added Emerson.
Poll: Afghan war a failure
Likely voters overwhelmingly support President Obama’s early withdrawal from Afghanistan in mid-2013, but narrowly believe that the war will be judged a failure. In a new Rasmussen poll, 67 percent back the withdrawal, but voters, 37 percent to 32 percent, say it will be judged a failure, not a success, bad news for Obama’s legacy.
Dems: GOP ‘panties in wad’
Republicans are seizing on President Obama’s flip-flop on so-called super-PACs, calling it his John Kerry moment. “He was against them before he was for them,” said a GOP official.
Late Monday, the campaign said that because Republican front-runner Mitt Romney was getting help from outside super-PACs, it decided to back one of its own, Priorities USA, started by a former Obama deputy spokesman, Bill Burton. The decision raises the possibility that warring sides will spend $1 billion each in the election.
Republicans predictably sneered, but that only brought shrugs from Democrats, who argued that by not aiding their own super-PAC, they were ignoring big buckets of money and playing under separate rules. After seeing emails and tweets of GOP outrage, Democratic Party Communications Director Brad Woodhouse tweeted that Republicans officials “have their panties in a wad ‘cuz we’re going to play by the rules they insisted on and support.”
Paul Bedard, The Examiner’s Washington Secrets columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears each weekday in the Politics section and on washingtonexaminer.com.
