After a year of heated debate, the U.S. Senate failed to pass both Democratic and Republican proposals to avoid automatic, across-the-board spending cuts Thursday afternoon. As a result, the $85 billion cuts, known as the sequester, took effect at midnight.
Although the sequester is not supposed to affect military pay or social safety-net programs such as Medicare and Social Security, major concerns loom over its impact on economic growth.
UF students won’t feel the effects of the spending cuts on their financial aid.
Rick Wilder, director of UF Student Financial Affairs, said any effect the sequester will have on student financial aid will be mild and won’t occur until the 2013-2014 academic year.
“Financial aid programs here at the university have been very stable for decades,” he said.
The cuts, however, will have a negative impact on research at universities.
David Norton, vice president for research at UF, said the cuts to research — which equal about 5 percent of federal funding, or about $14 million annually — will mean less support for graduate student research, fewer inventions from UF researchers and fewer companies sprung from research.
“From a national point of view, it’s a decrease in support for basic research funding at a time when we actually should be looking at increasing research because of the competitiveness in the global community,” he said.
The sequester will also impact public schools nationwide.
Jackie Johnson, spokeswoman for Alachua County Public Schools, said the cuts will be devastating on public education.
Although the district doesn’t know what the cuts will entail, she said it expects to face cuts of about 5 percent to 9 percent of the $39 million it receives annually from the federal government for programs such as Title I and Head Start.
She said the cuts will impact the most vulnerable students: the poor and disabled.
“The worst-case scenario is that we have a whole lot of students going without services,” she said. “I don’t like to think about poor children missing out on meals because the federal government can’t reach some sort of agreement on sequestration.”
