NASA has no plans to furlough civil servants if sequestration takes place in March, the space agency’s No. 2 said yesterday.
“I certainly can’t speculate about sequestration,” NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver told a Washington Space Business Roundtable audience in downtown Washington. “NASA, as we have consistently said, really continues to believe that we will have a budget set and if sequestration occurs, we are working to minimize the impact. We do not have plans to furlough civil servants.”
Garver declined to say whether NASA would furlough contractors, but said if sequestration cannot be resolved, NASA would lose funding from its various themes of space exploration, science, space operations, aeronautics, technology and education.
“We have a pretty high level of fixed costs,” Garver said. “So beyond that, I think it’s clear that a lot of the accomplishments that we had (for) next year would certainly be slowed.”
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) acting director Jeffrey Zients instructed federal agencies Monday to prepare for sequestration, saying federal agencies would likely need to furlough hundreds of thousands of employees March 1 unless Congress acts to amend current sequestration law. Zients also said President Obama would be forced to cancel $85 billion in budgetary resources across the federal government.
In a December 2012 report, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) trade group called sequestration cuts “the single greatest threat to our space programs’ continued success.” The report, “The Economic Impact of Sequestration on Civil Space Programs,” said if sequestration were to go into effect, NASA would experience an 8.2 percent cut across its budget for fiscal year 2013 and further cuts over the next eight years. AIA said in the report that the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 prohibits any cuts to the civil servant work force through FY ’13.