Congress allowed the March 1 deadline for forced budget cuts, also called sequestration, to expire. The cuts total $85 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government’s official nonpartisan accounting bureau. Over 10 years, they will amount to $1.2 trillion, according to CNN.com.

Sequestration is a result of a deal made between House Republicans and the Obama administration in 2011 regarding the debt ceiling. It was not intended to go into effect in its present form, but was to function as an incentive for both parties to create a more amenable budget solution, according to CNN.com. However, House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama failed to negotiate an alternate proposal.

Half of the spending cuts strike at the military, and the other half go toward domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything else — from national parks to the FBI.  The Department of Education is set to cut more than $4 billion, which may affect federal student aid to higher education, according to U.S. News and World Report. Notably, the cuts exclude Medicaid and Social Security, with Medicare mostly falling under that umbrella as well, according to CNN.com.

“Is that going to affect the average Biola student?”

Political science professor Scott Waller believes that Democrats are exploiting sequestration for political purposes.

“The Democrats are largely using the specter of these sequestration cuts as a kind of club to beat up the Republicans… [they] say that if sequestration kicks in, that a parade of horribles will happen, including babies starving in the street and things of that nature,” Waller said.

Waller stated that $85 billion, while a big-sounding number, is just 2.4 percent of this year’s $3.6 trillion budget.

“Is that going to affect the average Biola student? Maybe some, but not a whole lot,” Waller said.  Federal spending in 2013 is still projected to increase despite these cuts, according to Waller.

The definition of a cut

Waller also noted that the nature of the budget process in Washington D.C. affects the very definition of what a “cut” is. Rather than an absolute lessening of funds, it is a decrease in a proposed increase, according to Waller.

“Washington thinks like this: ‘Well, we spent $100,000 last year; we'd like to spend $150,000, but the Republicans are only willing to spend $130,000,’” Waller said. Such a compromise could be labelled a $20,000 cut — despite the overall spending increase.

Senior journalism major and former Biola Democratic Club president Andrew Entzminger is disappointed that partisanship made it unable for a deal to be made.

“It’s two groups of people who hate each other who don’t want to play nice, and it’s stupid. They’re all whiny babies who don’t know how to play nice,” Entzminger said. 

Entzminger believes that sequestration will affect Biola students.

“It might be a little harder for them to find jobs if they’re graduating soon,” Entzminger said.

Pros and cons of federal cuts

Without sequestration, gross domestic product growth would have been about 0.6 percentage points faster this year, which would have either created or retained 750,000 jobs, according to the CBO article.

Entzminger is a self-described “big government guy.”

“Government programs are great, right? People aren’t dying on the streets because we have homeless shelters,” he said, going on to list government agencies including welfare and Social Security that help those who need it.

However, Entzminger is not against all cuts in federal spending, citing the military and the drug war as two areas in which he would support cuts.

“There are areas we should be cutting back, and it’s not where we’re cutting back,” he said.

The end of CBO’s article presents a dilemma on federal deficit spending that has implications for both Republicans and Democrats, saying that the increased federal borrowing would cause the economy to tank in the long run, despite the short-term boost, if other tax or spending policies were not tweaked to make up for the deficits.