Sequestration would force the Defense Department and other federal agencies to lay off workers long before the defense industry had to, said a report released today by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Though big defense contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, have warned that the threat of sequestration might require them to send layoff notices to tens of thousands of employees just before the November elections, CSBA’s Todd Harrison said the effects of sequestration on defense companies would be delayed for months or years.
Not so with federal workers, which would feel the pinch at once: “About 108,000 of them would have to be furloughed or laid off, and that would happen nearly immediately, within days or weeks after sequestration occurs” on January 2nd, 2013, Harrison told reporters this morning. (The report did not estimate the impact on non-DoD agencies, which would be even larger).
The different impacts are due to the different rates at which the federal government spends money in different accounts. “There’s actually some cushion here for the defense industry,” Harrison said. “They primarily depend on procurement and RDT&E [research, development, test, and evaluation] funding.”