The Dumb Sequester Cuts Are Only For 7 Months

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I’ve actually made this point twice today already, but both times it’s been buried in a longer post. So here’s a post that just says one thing:

Yes, it’s a dumb idea for the sequester to make equal, across-the-board cuts to every single agency in the U.S. government. But those dumb cuts are only for this fiscal year, which ends in September. For the following years, the cuts will be made mostly through the normal appropriations process. Congress and the president will have lots of freedom to make the cuts exactly where they want to, and to spare whatever programs they can agree on.

Just keep this in mind. It’s dumb to cut R&D spending, for example, but it’s only being cut for seven months. After that, normal funding will be restored if Congress can figure out someplace else to make the cuts instead. They can even do this in a limited way via the continuing resolution scheduled for a vote later this month. The sequester is dumb, but it’s slightly less dumb than people are making it out to be.

NOTE: Of course, the main reason the sequester is dumb is because we shouldn’t be cutting spending at all right now. We should be spending more. But that’s a whole different issue.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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