White House Still Awkwardly Backtracking on Sequester-pocalypse

by John Sexton 

Ed Henry of Fox News asked White House spokesman Jay Carney about a recent about face on the reduction of border patrol agents. The turnabout seemed to be another case where White House has had to quietly backtrack on predictions of doom it was making just over a month ago.

 

In February, Secretary Napolitano gave written testimony to a Senate Committee on Appropriations. In a section devoted to sequestration's impact on border security, she wrote "Sequestration would force CBP to immediately begin furloughs of its employees, reduce overtime for frontline operations, and decrease its hiring to backfill positions. Specifically, beginning April 1, CBP would have to reduce its work hours by the equivalent of over 5,000 Border Patrol agents and the equivalent of over 2,750 CBP Officers."
A week later, Secretary Napolitano took part in the White House daily press briefing to warn that sequestration would necessarily mean fewer border patrol agents. "If you have 5,000 fewer border patrol agents, you have 5,000 fewer border patrol agents," she said. She warned that this would have a "real impact."
But as Ed Henry pointed out, on Monday DHS announced planned furloughs were postponed indefinitely. This came after a bill passed last month giving DHS and a few other agencies additional discretion in how to apply cuts. Republican lawmakers had suggested days prior to sequestration that such discretion could limit the negative impact of cuts and offered control of the cuts to the President. The President rejected the offer