U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday asked Congress to approve some 52 billion dollars in foreign aid and international spending in 2014, slightly higher than the current year’s budget which was cut due to the partisan impasse over how to reduce the yawning federal deficit.

Among other provisions, the new proposal calls for modest increases in global health and development assistance, as well as cuts in military aid to foreign countries and in special contingency funding for so-called “front-line states” — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The proposal also calls for major reform – which is likely to prove controversial in Congress — of the U.S. food-aid programme both to save money in shipping and other costs and encourage greater investment in food production and security in recipient countries.

A number of development and humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) active in poor countries expressed guarded relief at the proposed foreign-aid budget, which was unveiled as part of a total 3.8-trillion-dollar federal budget package that will now be taken up by Congress.

“At first glance, I am pleased to see President Obama’s sustained overall commitment to poverty-focused development,” said Samuel Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of nearly 200 NGOs. “Even in a time of belt-tightening, the U.S. must maintain its moral leadership in helping the world’s most poor and vulnerable.”

He and other NGO leaders appealed for lawmakers in Congress, who approved budget resolutions for international affairs spending earlier this year that are well below the administration’s request, to reconsider their position. Last month, the House of Representatives approved a resolution that provided only 38.7 billion dollars for the international affairs base budget – a 25-percent cut from 2012.

“As budget negotiations continue, tough choices must be made, but it is imperative to support robust funding for interventions that are both cost-effective and save lives, like maternal health, food security and emergency humanitarian response,” said Adam Taylor, vice president of World Vision, a major relief group.

As in the past, the proposed international affairs budget, which funds the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as U.S. contributions to the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, accounts for only slightly more than one percent of the total federal budget and about slightly less than 10 percent of the Pentagon’s proposed spending.

Under the administration’s proposal, the Defence Department would receive 527 billion dollars – more than the world’s next 20 biggest military establishments combined — for its core 2014 budget. That total does not include an estimated 88 billion dollars to fund continuing military operations in Afghanistan.

Advocates of aid and diplomacy have long complained about the imbalance – which worsened considerably under President George W. Bush (2001-09) – between Washington’s “hard” and “soft power” spending.

“If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition,” the head of the U.S. Central Command (CentCom), Gen. James Mattis, warned senators just in testimony last month.

Wednesday’s release of the proposed budget begins a process of negotiation involving the Republican-dominated House and the Democratic-led Senate — as well as the administration — that is certain to last most of this year and possibly well into 2014, particularly given the persistent inability of the parties to agree on a long-term deficit-reduction plan.

Failure to reach such an accord this year will almost certainly result in another round of major across-the-board cuts in all discretionary spending.

The proposed 52-billion-dollar international affairs budget includes an overseas contingency operations (OCO) fund of 3.8 billion dollars mainly for State Department and USAID activities in the three “front-line states”, as well as 48.2 billion dollars in core spending. While the latter figure is slightly more than the current year’s total, it represents a decline of nearly 15 percent compared to 2010.

While proposed funding levels overall are roughly the same as this year’s, the request includes some significant changes in the way the funds will be allocated.

In light of the killings last September in Benghazi of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and two members of his staff, the budget for embassy security will increase by 55 percent, or almost 900 million dollars. Contributions to international peacekeeping are slated to rise by nearly 10 percent, in part due to anticipated costs of a U.N. presence in Mali and Syria, as well as a new African Union mission in Somalia.

Bilateral development assistance would increase by five percent over 2013 levels to nearly three billion dollars, while global health programmes, the biggest component of which is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), will increase by about 3.4 percent to some 8.3 billion dollars.

The proposed budget would also provide 580 million dollars to a new Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund that would be designed to encourage countries to implement democratic and economic reforms in the wake of the “Arab Spring”. Obama had proposed 700 million dollars for a similar facility but Congress declined to fund it.

Some of the most notable reductions, on the other hand, include a nine-percent cut in the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) account, which provides credits and guarantees for foreign countries to buy U.S. military goods; and much bigger declines in aid to poor countries in Europe and Central Asia, as well as the “front-line states” of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Compared to 2012, aid to Eurasia will be reduced by almost half. The budget for State Department and USAID operations in the three front-line states is due to fall from 11.2 billion dollars just two years ago to 6.1 billion dollars in 2014, with Iraq taking the brunt of the cuts.

Some relief groups expressed concern about proposed major cuts in humanitarian and international disaster assistance, although changes in the food-aid programme are theoretically supposed to help compensate.

For the current year, Congress has appropriated 5.6 billion dollars for international disaster aid, migration and refugee assistance, and the Food for Peace programme. But the proposed budget provides a combined total of only 4.1 billion dollars for those accounts, including a reformed food-aid programme, according to Jeremy Kadden, InterAction’s senior legislative manager. “It’s a huge cut, and we don’t have an explanation for it yet,” he told IPS.

“The U.S. has long been generous in assisting those whose lives have been shattered by conflict and disaster, but humanitarian-assistance funding in President Obama’s budget is unlikely to keep up with global needs,” said George Rupp, president of the International Rescue Committee.

“We hope the House and Senate will provide robust humanitarian assistance in next year’s budget, and toward that end we look forward to working closely with Congress.”

On multilateral agencies, a number of which have also played major roles in providing humanitarian assistance, U.S. contributions would remain mostly unchanged from current levels, which is also of concern to some groups.

“In an increasingly complex world with new crises breaking out every year, is consistent support going to be enough?” asked Don Kraus, who heads Citizens for Global Solutions.

“It is still unclear if this budget will give the White House enough resources to respond to global emergencies or increase the U.N.’s capacity to play a more effective role in the world,” he added, noting that this could be a major topic of discussion when Obama meets at the White House Thursday with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

A child is vaccinated for polio outside Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Katelyn Fossett
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2013 (IPS)

A U.S.-based civil society coalition is calling on Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration to keep spending on global health aid at current levels, warning that recent budget cuts risk a dangerous backslide in health and development gains achieved over the past three decades.

The new brief has been published by InterAction, a Washington-based umbrella of international NGOs, is supported by 37 organisations. It warns that any future cuts to these programmes would endanger important health milestones achieved in part due to U.S. assistance.We have a choice: we can invest now or pay forever.

These include the near-eradication of polio and the treatment of over five million people living with HIV/AIDS. In addition, the brief warns that austerity-related budget cuts that went into effect on Mar. 1 could lead to the re-emergence or worsening of critical global health threats, like those posed by the spread of malaria and tuberculosis.

“The U.S. is at a critical juncture in its global health efforts: budget pressures threaten the global health gains that have been made and jeopardize programming … Capitalizing on our successes and meeting emerging global health challenges will require increased and sustained commitments by all donors,” the brief says.

But the warning is competing with snowballing enthusiasm for budget-cutting that has seized Washington since the recent cuts, known here as the “sequester”, went into effect. Cutting roughly five percent of all federal budgets, analysts say the sequester would slice around 433 million dollars from U.S. global health aid for the remainder of this fiscal year alone.

The United States is the world’s largest individual donor to a spectrum of global health initiatives.

“We see the brief as a resource for members of Congress and their staff on U.S. investments in global health,” Danielle Heiberg, one of the authors of the brief, told IPS. “By highlighting how current and past U.S. investments have made significant progress in global health, we hope that Congress will understand the value and importance of maintaining appropriate funding for the global health accounts.”

“Sustained US investments in global health programs and health systems strengthening are crucial – health problems will only be more expensive and more difficult to resolve in the future, especially with the rise of non-communicable diseases (cancer, lung and heart-disease and diabetes) in all populations,” the brief says.

Sequester-related cuts have been forced to impact on nearly all federal programmes, with Congress purposefully designing them so that neither policymakers nor agency heads could target the reductions at waste or initiatives of low priority. Critics note that foreign aid generally only constitutes about one percent of the U.S.’s total budget – with just a tenth of that for global health.

Nonetheless, U.S. spending still has an outsized impact on global health projects. Indeed, the United States has taken on an even more expanded role since the 2008 financial crisis led other donor countries to cut their aid programmes.

Newly released data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a grouping of rich, industrialised countries, has revealed a 5.4-billion-dollar decline in general international aid flows worldwide in the past year.

Advocates have expressed particular concern about the future of U.S. health assistance because it does not have the deep political support that bolsters other kinds of foreign developmental assistance. Projects for which mutual economic opportunities for donor and recipient countries are far more visible – such as improving infrastructure or trade, for instance – tend to benefit from deeper political support than that for health aid.

“Domestic donor interests have much more influence in donor capitals where aid decisions are being made,” Gregory Adams, head of the aid effectiveness programme at Oxfam International, a humanitarian group, told IPS. “The more locally owned and demand-driven aid gets cut first.”

Adams listed the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, an international financing organisation, as one of the groups that is affected by this decision-making bias.

Indeed, on Monday the Global Fund announced a massive new 15-billion-dollar fundraising goal. If it attains this goal, the group says it will be able to prevent a million new HIV infections and save the lives of almost six million people with tuberculosis.

“We have a choice: we can invest now or pay forever,” Mark Dybul, executive director of the Global Fund, said Monday. “Innovations in science and implementation have given us a historic opportunity to completely control these diseases. If we do not, the long-term costs will be staggering.”

Double problem

Oxfam’s Adams further warns that there is a “double problem” with foreign aid.

“It’s not just that the [aid] is not getting to the people who need it, but you take these countries that trusted the United States and give them reason not to trust the U.S,” he said.

“We keep asking partner countries to show more leadership – to do a better job of leading and meeting their own countries’ needs, but sometimes the global donor country makes it very difficult for those countries to plan their leadership by changing the goal posts.”

In addition, failure to follow through on health assistance could introduce the additional obstacles of reduced immunity and new drug-resistant strains of a disease, particularly with malaria and tuberculosis.

“History shows that if we scale back funding, malaria will re-emerge worse than ever, especially since populations with reduced immunity will face an increase in morbidity,” the InterAction brief states.

In March, the World Health Organisation issued a statement on the increasing spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis, a growing public health crisis due in part to its history of incomplete treatments in developing countries. A study in August 2012 found that almost half of TB patients were not responsive to either first- or second-line treatments, suggesting the disease could become “virtually untreatable”.

For now, health and aid groups are expressing fear, uncertainty and a fair amount of outrage as they wait to feel the concrete effects of the March cuts.

“The sequester is going to have a significant and detrimental effect,” Oxfam’s Adams said. “[But] it’s a blunt instrument – it’s hard to predict how the axe is going to fall.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently with the broad federal spending cuts beginning Mar. 1, experts have warned that an austerity-minded political system could bring about dramatic changes in the U.S. foreign aid model.

A significant part of this conversation has focused on shifting away from a government-led approach and instead strengthening the role of the private sector in development assistance. But critics are focusing attention on the potential pitfalls of such a redesign.

“The idea that there is a lack of public resources, so we need to be leveraging private money, ignores some of the options to increase public funds,” Janet Redman, director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.The danger lies in pretending that gross domestic product and foreign direct investment is the same as making economies more sustainable.

She says there are numerous other public sector options available for a country in the United States’ position. These include, for instance, taxes on financial transactions and carbon, both approaches that have largely been left out of the political discussion here in Washington amidst a shift in focus onto the private sector.

In a report released this week, a think tank task force of development experts and business leaders here urged the U.S. government to increase its reliance on the private sector in foreign aid flows aimed at development.

Citing changes in technology and an increased willingness among developing countries to engage with U.S. companies, researchers with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) predict that the United States’ current model of development assistance could be obsolete within 25 years.

The CSIS report authors are calling for a shift from a government-based approach to a “blend of development, trade and investment”.

Such recommendations are based on global shifts in technology and business, especially the rapid outpacing of public sector development funds by the private sector. According to the report, the private sector currently spends over 87 percent of U.S. funds flowing to the developing world.

The share of public funding, meanwhile, has fallen from 71 percent in 1960 to just nine percent today.

Some also feel there is evidence that the private sector may be able to deepen the impact of foreign aid by equipping people in developing countries with new skill sets.

By equipping a person with a skill set instead of simply money, said Thomas J. Pritzker, executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, “You’ll also give him hope – and hope is a crucial aspect of social stability.” He called peace and prosperity “two sides of the same coin”.

Narrative problem

Still, the prospect of the private sector serving as a primary engine of growth for development indicators is, for some, a controversial premise. Janet Redman, for instance, notes that the report’s findings are predicated on a potentially dangerous “narrative problem”.

She also cautions against adopting a system in which development institutions are designed to function more like companies, at the expense of meeting the needs of people who stand to benefit the most from foreign assistance.

Ensuring access to, for instance, health care, water and education should not be profit-driven enterprises, she stressed, because doing so would set up a “dynamic where companies looking for an investment may need to see a particular rate of return for them to invest.”

Redman continued: “The danger lies in pretending that gross domestic product and foreign direct investment is the same as making economies more sustainable and enabling them to meet the needs of their citizens.”

Private sector funds often don’t trickle down to the poorest members of a host country, a finding supported by a 2011 report published by the Independent Evaluation Group, the internal watchdog for the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector arm.

“The link from growth to poverty reduction is not automatic,” that report found, “particularly in situations where market failures and other inefficiencies limit participation of the poor.”

According to the auditor’s findings, less than a quarter of the IFC projects that generated satisfactory returns also generated identifiable benefits to the poor.

U.S. weariness

Of course, there are major challenges to any such dramatic overhaul of the United States’ development assistance model.

Many, for instance, refer to an increasing gap between how companies, federal agencies and NGOs function and communicate with each other. Business and NGO leaders at the event also attested to notable deficiencies in trust between the public and private sectors.

“There is not a system in place that would allow for cooperation on this scale between the different actors,” Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based NGOs, told IPS. Developing such a system may be a task for the donor countries, he added.

Meanwhile, the challenge of U.S. public opinion looms large in any current discussion of foreign aid. As the Mar. 1 budget cuts are phased in, and as the United State withdraws from more than a decade of military involvement in the Middle East, many here are eying any kind of international engagement more warily than ever.

Experts on the issue are urging a shift in public opinion, warning against allowing war-weariness to translate into weariness with international engagement in general.

The impact of the budget cuts would be felt in communities around the world almost immediately. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

Public health workers, activists and policymakers are stepping up a last-minute campaign to highlight the global health impact of historic, sweeping cuts to the U.S. federal budget due to go into effect Friday if Congress doesn’t act.

While some are suggesting that the automatic reductions, known here as the “sequester”, could set back health-related research and outcomes by a generation, others are warning that NGOs and project implementers, long working on the assumption that the cutbacks would be averted, are now finding themselves massively underprepared for how to operate on slashed budgets.

“While these budget cuts would affect a huge number of national and international programmes, global health is one of the few in which people’s lives are actually at risk,” Ali Escalante, a volunteer with the ONE campaign, an advocacy group, told IPS.This has caught academics and the intelligentsia by surprise, and by the time they woke up and understood, it was too late.

“Thanks to U.S. leadership, we’ve made huge advances in fighting poverty and preventable diseases over the past decade. But we’ve come too far to turn back now – risking that progress would be a tragedy for both the United States and the world.”

Along with around 150 concerned citizens from across the country, Escalante was in Washington on Tuesday to meet with members of Congress and underscore the sequester’s impact on global health.

The United States is currently by far the world’s largest supporter of global health research and interventions, a role that has only expanded since the 2008 global financial crisis led most other international donors to roll back their own foreign aid programmes.

Yet due to disagreements within the U.S. Congress over how to shrink the national debt, involuntary spending reductions are scheduled to go into effect on Mar. 1. Purposefully nonsensical, these would eliminate 85 billion dollars of federal spending this year and 1.2 trillion over the next decade, which some estimate could slash more than five percent from all federal programmes.

According to Escalante and others, the impact would be felt in communities around the world almost immediately.

“For instance, there are currently over eight million people being treated for AIDS, up from 200,000 just 10 years ago,” she says. “So we project out that if these cuts happen, 170,000 people would stop receiving U.S.-funded treatments. And we also know that those people will die.”

These reductions alone, she suggests, could directly lead to 37,000 AIDS-related deaths, many of parents who could leave behind upwards of 74,000 orphans.

And that’s just the AIDS-related impact. According to a new report released Tuesday by the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), a U.S. umbrella group, sequestration could shrink global health spending at the State Department and USAID (the country’s main foreign aid arm) by 484 million dollars this year.

Further, the National Institutes of Health, responsible for overseeing much of the country’s health-related research, could lose almost two billion dollars, on top of reductions to several other federally funded research programmes.

GHTC researchers suggest that these budget reductions could “jeopardise” up to 200 new global health tools that are currently in the research process. These include drugs, vaccines and other products to counteract HIV, tuberculosis, African sleeping sickness, dengue fever and others.

“The US commitment must be renewed,” the report states. “There is too much to lose if the United States pulls back from this legacy now, as US investment has driven the creation of the largest global health product development pipeline in history that is poised to become the next generation of lifesaving products.

Hundreds of thousands of lives

Amidst the confounding political spectacle of the U.S. debt negotiations leading up to the sequester, what has particularly frustrated many observers is the miniscule impact that foreign aid-related cutbacks would have on the United States’ broader deficit problems.

Contrary to the belief of many in the country, foreign spending makes up less than one percent of the national budget. Of that, just a tenth goes into health spending.

“We’re not talking about much money in terms of the country’s budget, but in terms of impact it’s enormous,” Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“Further, in terms of public giving the United States is responsible for 52 percent of all global health support. There is just no one prepared to step into that breach.”

While it is unclear exactly how deeply programme heads would need to slice, estimates run anywhere from three to eight percent.

“At eight percent, now you’re talking about dead bodies,” Garrett says. “The way I look at it, that’s mass-scale medical malpractice. One thing a physician is trained to do is not to end treatment until a patient doesn’t need it any more. Cutting off this funding now means hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Previous attempts to roll back U.S.-funded AIDS medications saw almost immediate public demonstrations outside of U.S. embassies in Africa, and Garrett notes that similar reactions should be expected if the current reductions take place, as well.

Congress can still tweak or undo the sequester entirely, though President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans remain firmly entrenched in their positions, with no public negotiations taking place whatsoever.

Regardless of the eventual timeframe, however, Garrett says that public health groups are notably unprepared for the impacts, whether long or short term.

“This has caught academics and the intelligentsia by surprise, and by the time they woke up and understood, it was too late – some health groups have only now started to ask what it will mean for their programme,” she says.

“The most important thing everyone can do right now is to start providing seriously reliable metrics that can show the impact of sequestration – not a lot of hand-waving and hysteria. Every group out there needs to take this as seriously as possible and be responsible about it. If actual lives are lost, this needs to be documented.”

With just a week to go before massive, indiscriminate spending cuts kick in across the U.S. government, policymakers and humanitarian groups are becoming increasingly anxious about the enduring impact the cuts would have on the communities across the globe assisted by U.S.-funded development and aid programmes.

“[W]e fear that the U.S.agencies that oversee humanitarian response will be put in an impossible position, choosing between saving lives in one country over another,” 40 humanitarian groups wrote in an open letter to policymakers this week. “We also ask that any additional resources not come from other critical poverty fighting accounts within the International Affairs budget, which will also be under pressure.”

The groups warn that costs for international humanitarian needs have already become “overstretched” due to security concerns in Syria, Mali, Congo and Sudan, as well as ongoing food security issues across the Sahel. In Syria alone, they note, humanitarian-related costs are estimated at 1.5 billion dollars just through June, double the figure since September.The important thing to understand is that these cuts will cost lives.

Driving these concerns is the suddenly real possibility that a piece of compromise legislation signed into law in August 2011, aimed at forcing Republicans and Democrats to agree to a long-term deal to bring down the country’s foreign debt, could be enacted starting Mar. 2.

Known here as the “sequester”, the process stipulated that if such a deal were not agreed upon by the end of last year, budgets across the federal government would be summarily slashed by 85 billion dollars this fiscal year and 1.2 trillion dollars over a decade.

Most frustrating to economists and other observers is that the sequester does not cover most healthcare-related spending, the source of much of the country’s soaring deficit. Yet because the legislation would become law partway through the current fiscal year, all cuts would have to be done on an expedited basis to meet deadline requirements.

While a minor last-minute agreement was struck in late December, it merely pushed off a decision on the sequester. Meanwhile, Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, are insisting that the debt problem needs to be solved by raising additional tax revenue, while Republicans maintain that the money needs to come solely from lowering government spending.

Importantly, the sequester cuts were crafted to be “dumb”, in that neither policymakers nor agency heads would be allowed to aim the cuts at waste or areas of lesser priority. The cuts are also purposefully painful to both Democrats, who typically favour social programmes, and Republicans, who typically favour defence spending.

For these reasons, most observers had expected that legislators couldn’t possibly allow the sequester to go through. Analysts, after all, are forecasting an economic contraction of up to 0.6 percent, with ramifications for essentially all U.S.citizens.

However, barring further last-minute deals – and Congress is currently on a 10-day break – agencies throughout the states and federal government are currently forced to scramble to plan for what could be one of the most destabilising moves the country has ever inflicted on itself.

Cuts cost lives

No exemption will be made for overseas spending, despite constituting less than one percent of overall federal spending. Indeed, as reported in a new public poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center, U.S. respondents preferred cutting “aid to the world’s needy” more than any of 18 other budget options.

According to information released this week by John Kerry, the new secretary of state, the State Department and USAID, the country’s main overseas aid agency, would need to cut around 2.6 billion dollars from this year’s budget.

That would entail chopping 200 million dollars in humanitarian assistance and 400 million dollars in global health programmes. That would include a reduction of 300 million dollars in the budget of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – this year alone.

“Such a reduction would hinder our ability to provide life saving food assistant to 2 million people and USAID would have to cease, reduce, or not initiate assistance to millions of disaster affected people,” Kerry wrote to legislators. He also noted that the cuts would “gravely impede” efforts at reducing AIDS-related and child deaths.

“The important thing to understand is that these cuts will cost lives,” said Jeremy Kadden, senior legislative manager with InterAction, an alliance of U.S. NGOs working in developing countries.

“We’ve made very significant progress over the past 10 years, with real people improving their lives, and this would set that process back enormously, devastating actual people on the ground.”

Sequester cuts would lead to some three million children losing access to the basic education they’re currently receiving, Kadden says. Two million people would also see reductions or outright cuts in food aid, while 600,000 children would lose nutrition assistance. (The group is offering more figures here and here.)

According to InterAction estimates, theUnited Stateshas helped some 400 million people get out of extreme poverty over the past two decades. Last year alone,U.S.food aid reached around 70 million people.

New baseline

Despite the fact that the sequester was never meant as policy, its impact would reverberate for years. According to a new article by Tony P. Hall, a formerU.S. ambassador to the World Food Programme, the current budget negotiations could prove to be “the most far-reaching for the next decade”.

Pointing to the long-term ramifications of even temporarily halting basic education, nutrition or health programmes, including vaccines, Kadden likewise warns that the impact would be “enormous”. Further, this newly reduced funding could constitute baseline budgets in the future.

“If the budget in use at the end of fiscal year 2013 is, say, 5 percent lower than in previous years, and that’s the basis for subsequent years, we’re talking about millions of people who don’t have access to the food, vaccines or basic education they need,” Kadden says.

“There are so many places around the world right now that need help, and we need to ensure, first, that we do no harm. Unfortunately, that seems to be the direction we’re heading in at the moment.”

Even if the sequester goes into effect at the end of next week, members of Congress are required to pass new related legislation by the end of March. Advocates are currently looking at that window as a critical opportunity to ensure that members of Congress hear from constituents and are made to understand the full implications of all sequester-related cuts.