Ashlee Fields, a single mother in Washington, DC, knows she could be among 600,000 people culled from a food-aid programme after US budget cuts take hold.
For Fields and her two-year-old son Kaiden, the consequences include a degraded diet, as healthy subsidised products disappear from her shopping basket - even as millions in taxpayer dollars still flow to boost overseas advertising and sales of potatoes, prunes, and California wine.
"I'm not even going to try to sugarcoat it -- I wouldn't be in the store buying whole grains and vegetables, even though I know it's the right thing to do," Fields, 22, a part-time administrative assistant, said in an interview. "It's so expensive, and my budget just couldn't handle it."
Nutrition assistance that help Fields and export-promotion programmes that offer taxpayer money to California vineyards for wine tastings in Europe both fall under the US Department of Agriculture, which must trim $2 billion from its $155 billion annual spending plan.
The cuts apply throughout departmental budgets, with little flexibility, in a process designed to be so painful Democrats and Republicans would find an alternative. They didn't, and now the federal government needs to save $85 billion this year in a process known as sequestration.
President Barack Obama on March 1 called the automatic cuts that took effect that day "dumb" and "arbitrary," and House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said the procedure was a "silly" way of doing business.
"There's broad consensus that sequestration is not a sound way to cut the budget," said Robert Greenstein, president of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a group that advocates for policies to help poor and middle-class families. "It cuts everything by the same percentage, even though some things should not be cut at all, and some things should be cut more. It's a real meat-ax approach."
Consequences may include longer lines at borders and airports, as customs agents lose overtime pay to vet airline travelers and ship containers as they enter the country, and prospective delays in courts as Justice Department employees take furloughs. The USDA has also warned it would have less money for meat and poultry plant inspections, which could force production losses when slaughterhouses close because officials aren't present.
Lawmakers are seeking agreement to keep the government funded past a separate March 27 deadline, and the deal could include spending flexibility to blunt the sequestration's impact on agencies including the Agriculture Department.
The USDA cuts put in place mean as many as 600,000 recipients would be denied access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a February 5 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The WIC programme helps some nine million poor people buy milk, baby formula, fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods and is the programme relied upon by Fields, the Washington single mother.
Decisions on who loses nutrition will be made by regional officials who administer the programme. In New York, as many as 130,000 of 515,000 participants in the programme could be dropped from rolls, Cindy Walton, chairwoman of the WIC Association of New York State, said in an interview. The toll is high because the five per cent cut must be concentrated in the remainder of the financial eyar that ends September 30, she said.
New mothers who aren't breast-feeding are candidates for removal, Walton said. Case workers aren't looking forward to delivering news on funding decisions to young families.
"It's going to be tough," Walton said. "We're going to have all kinds of reactions, from crying, to 'How can I feed my kids?' That's hard."
At the same time, the market access programme that subsidises fruit and wine exports - as well as sales of pistachios, walnuts, papaya, ginseng, mohair and catfish - is taking the same five per cent reduction, or $10 million from its $200 million annual budget.
