{"id":7853,"date":"2012-09-12T11:06:46","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T16:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=7853"},"modified":"2012-09-12T11:06:46","modified_gmt":"2012-09-12T16:06:46","slug":"health-ed-enviro-sci-communities-prep-for-fiscal-cliff-nddunited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2012\/09\/12\/health-ed-enviro-sci-communities-prep-for-fiscal-cliff-nddunited\/","title":{"rendered":"Health, ed, enviro, sci communities prep for fiscal cliff #NDDUnited"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

OMB's Robert Gordon at NDD town hall meeting<\/p><\/div>\n

By Nadine Lymn, ESA director of public affairs<\/p>\n

Yesterday\u2019s second town hall meeting of the Non Defense Discretionary (NDD) coalition, drew an audience of 400 and featured two representatives from the Obama Adminstration.\u00a0 Jon Carson, who does public outreach for the White House and Robert Gordon, Acting Deputy Director of the White Office of Management and Budget (OMB).<\/p>\n

The two reviewed the Administration\u2019s position on the upcoming fiscal cliff.\u00a0 Many in Washington, DC refer to the pending expiration of the 2001 Bush tax cuts plus the planned federal budget cuts as the \u201cfiscal cliff\u201d and unless Congress takes action, it will occur on January 1, 2013.<\/p>\n

Carson\u2019s overall message to the assembled group was to encourage them to continue to demonstrate the value of federal programs and their connection to local communities across the country.<\/p>\n

Gordon noted that the upcoming OMB transparency report related to the budget sequestration and scheduled to be released still this week, would be an enormous but not surprising document; it will not \u201cchange the fact that cuts will threaten national security and critical investments here at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some in the large audience\u2013which included represenatives from the public health, education, environmental and science communities, asked that the Obama Administration encourage federal agencies to supply more information about how they would be affected by the pending cuts.<\/p>\n

When asked if the President would veto a bill that would delay the sequester, Gordon declared that he would.<\/p>\n

While there are many scenarious, no one knows how Congress and the Administration will ultimately deal with the national debt crisis. All everyone seems to agree on is that it will not be dealt with until after the General Election.<\/p>\n

As anyone following the news is well aware, the two parties have been in gridlock and have starkly different visions of the best way to address the nation\u2019s debt crisis.\u00a0 The NDD Coalition continues to push for a \u201cbalanced\u201d approach that would avoid further cuts to NDD programs, which have already taken large cuts; NDD funding is at historically low levels not seen since the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Yet even so, word on Capitol Hill is that Members of Congress and their staff continue to hear from the Defense community and from constituents encouraging them to continue to slash NDD programs.\u00a0 They are still not hearing much from those of us in the NDD community.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, the Ecological Society of America, the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the American Mathematical Society teamed up to craft an action alert to our respective members, urging them to make their voices heard to their congressional representatives.\u00a0 To date, only about 1300 letters have been sent.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t taken the 5 minutes needed to take this action, we encourage you to do so.\u00a0 Click here<\/a> to go to the AIBS Legislative Action page where you\u2019ll find more information on the fiscal cliff and budget sequestration and the letter to modify as you wish and send to your delegation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nadine Lymn, ESA director of public affairs Yesterday\u2019s second town hall meeting of the Non Defense Discretionary (NDD) coalition, drew an audience of 400 and featured two representatives from the Obama Adminstration.\u00a0 Jon Carson, who does public outreach for the White House and Robert Gordon, Acting Deputy Director of the White Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The two…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[158,1424,134,1241,141,96,92,473,68,848,1439],"class_list":["post-7853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology-in-policy","tag-budget","tag-budget-cuts","tag-congress","tag-debt","tag-defense","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-esa","tag-obama-administration","tag-science","tag-sequestration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}