Stymied by a GOP House, Obama looks ahead to 2014 to cement his legacy

President Obama, now facing the consequences of automatic spending cuts and the complications they raise for his broader domestic agenda, is taking the most specific steps of his administration in an attempt to ensure the election of a Democratic-controlled Congress in two years.

“What I can’t do is force Congress to do the right thing,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Friday after a fruitless meeting with Republican leaders to avert the country’s latest fiscal crisis, known as the sequester. “The American people may have the capacity to do that.”

Obama, fresh off his November reelection, began almost at once executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president. He is doing so by trying to articulate for the American electorate his own feelings — an exasperation with an opposition party that blocks even the most politically popular elements of his agenda.

Obama has committed to raising money for fellow Democrats, agreed to help recruit viable candidates, and launched a political nonprofit group dedicated to furthering his agenda and that of his congressional allies. The goal is to flip the Republican-held House back to Democratic control, allowing Obama to push forward with a progressive agenda on gun control, immigration, climate change and the economy during his final two years in office, according to congressional Democrats, strategists and others familiar with Obama’s thinking.

“The president understands that to get anything done, he needs a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “To have a legacy in 2016, he will need a House majority in 2014, and that work has to start now.”

An evolution in strategy

This approach marks a significant shift in the way Obama has worked with a divided Congress. He has compromised and badgered, but rarely — and never so early — campaigned to change its composition.

Democrats would have to gain 17 House seats to win back the majority they lost in 2010, and their challenge involves developing a persuasive argument for why the party deserves another chance controlling both Congress and the presidency. In the last election, American voters reaffirmed the political status quo in Washington, choosing to retain a divided government.

Of all the presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only Bill Clinton picked up House seats for his party in the midterm election of his second term
. His approval rating on the eve of the 1998 contest was 65 percent, 14 points above Obama’s current public standing.

The specific steps Obama is taking to win back the House for his party mark an evolution for a president long consumed by the independence of his political brand.

Obama has committed to eight fundraisers for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this year, compared with just two events in 2009. The Democrats lost the House the following year, and Obama’s legislative agenda has largely stalled since then.

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Obama, congressional leaders fail to reach deal on sequester

President Obama acknowledged Friday that deep federal budget cuts are here with no end in sight, an outcome that he warned would harm the economy but said he lacked the power to stop.

A final attempt to find common ground with congressional leaders at a White House meeting proved fruitless. The president continued to press for higher taxes as part of a deal, and Republicans continued to refuse — clearing the way for $85 billion in cuts this fiscal year and $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

The reductions, which Obama formally ordered late Friday, are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future. There had been speculation that they might be adjusted later this month, when lawmakers must agree on a new deal to fund the government or risk a shutdown. But Obama made clear Friday that he would seek to avoid a shutdown even if that means allowing the across-the-board cuts, known as the sequester, to continue.

The failure to reach a deal to turn off the sequester after years of clashes over spending and taxes will usher in an era of deeper austerity in the United States. To date, the country has resisted the sharp pullback in federal spending that has occurred in much of Europe.

The onset of the sequester also will introduce a new level of uncertainty for Americans who rely on the government for employment or services, with an outsize impact in the Washington region.

For Obama, the failure to reach a deal is a setback. He has spent years arguing that efforts to tame the nation’s debt should involve a balance of spending cuts and tax revenues. As things stand now, the onset of the sequester means that balance tilts heavily toward cuts.

Polls shows Obama has broad support among Americans for his approach to taxes and spending. Over coming weeks, senior administration officials said, he will highlight people and localities hurt by the sequester, with the intention of creating pressure to force Republicans to concede. But the president said that could take months.

“It’s happening because of a choice that Republicans in Congress have made,” Obama said in the White House briefing room after the meeting with congressional leaders broke up. “They’ve allowed these cuts to happen because they refuse to budge on closing a single wasteful loophole to help reduce the deficit.”

The GOP is able to say it defied the president, avoiding his demand for new tax revenue. The standoff comes after deep intraparty divisions nearly tore House Republicans apart late last year in battles about whether to support tax increases.

Republicans can say they have forced greater restraint in government spending — although it is far from the arrangement most GOP leaders wanted. Republican leaders have warned that the sequester could damage national defense and expressed frustration that it does not apply to social programs such as Medicaid and Social Security.

Nonetheless, they say the cuts are preferable to tax increases.

“Let’s make it clear that the president got his tax hikes on January 1st,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said outside the White House, referring to new taxes on the wealthy approved in January. “This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over. It’s about taking on the spending problem here in Washington.”

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Why can’t all agencies avoid sequestration furloughs?

Some federal agencies appear to be better-positioned than others to avoid furloughs, which are likely to happen unless Congress and the president reach a deal to avert the automatic budget cuts set to kick in Friday.

The Government Accountability Office, the Small Business Administration, the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Agency for International Development have all said they expect to meet their cost-saving targets without resorting to unpaid leave.

So how have those agencies managed to avoid the likelihood of furloughs while others have not?

Some union leaders and lawmakers, especially Republicans, say planners just have to put their minds to it. But many experts who study federal budgets have said other factors come into play.

“Agencies have enormous discretion in this regard, but some are so predominantly personnel-driven that they have little choice but to furlough,” said Patrick Lester, director of fiscal policy for the Center for Effective Government.

Indeed, the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Aviation Administration have said in recent weeks that they expect furloughs to be necessary under sequestration — as the budget cuts are called — and all dedicate a relatively high percentage of their budgets toward pay and benefits.

Lester said agencies that rely heavily on grants and contracting are less likely to depend on unpaid leave to meet their reduction targets. “They have the ability to push the cuts into their contracts — they can delay them,” he said.

Most agencies don’t fall neatly into the contract- and personnel-heavy categories, leaving virtually every government entity that says it might resort to furloughs susceptible to criticism.

Conservatives have challenged agencies to identify and trim more waste, while union leaders have repeatedly urged them to reduce spending on private contractors — even pressing Congress to pass legislation to that effect.

John J. O’Grady, president of a Chicago-region chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, said agency leaders “really haven’t done their homework. They were under the illusion that [the sequester] wasn’t really going to happen.”

O’Grady said that most agencies haven’t yet maximized reductions in contractor spending, and he noted that some have provided five-figure bonuses to managers during the past fiscal year despite the looming cuts.

The White House budget office contends that rigid sequester rules have left little room for agencies to avoid furloughs.

“Sequestration was never designed to be flexible,” said a White House official not authorized to talk about the matter on the record. “It was designed to force a compromise.”

As for the GAO, which has just 2,900 workers, Comptroller Gene L. Dodaro sent a memo to employees last week saying the agency could probably meet its sequester target by halting new hires, trimming travel expenditures and reducing IT investments.

“We project that we would no longer require furloughs at GAO to absorb the potential reduction associated with sequestration,” Dodaro said.

Similarly, the SBA has said that it reduced staffing levels enough through early retirements to avoid furloughs and that the agency expects to meet demand for its small business loans moving forward, according to the Associated Press.

“We are not slowing down giving loans to anyone,” SBA Administrator Karen Mills told reporters last week, noting that the agency anticipates a sharp decline in demand for the 504 loans that spiked last year because of a now-expired provision that allowed the funds to be used for refinancing mortgages.

Smithsonian Institution spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas said on Wednesday that the museum operator anticipated the sequester would happen and budgeted “very, very conservatively” since the start of the fiscal year.

Like other agencies, the Smithsonian Institution has delayed maintenance and repairs, adjusted contracts, and reduced staff travel and training to help achieve its target savings, St. Thomas said.

Two-thirds of the organization’s roughly 6,000 workers are federal employees; the rest work for the independent Smithsonian trust fund. But St. Thomas said the institution does not expect to use furloughs for any of its personnel if the sequester takes effect.

USAID said in an agency notice to employees last week that it does not intend to furlough workers this year and instead anticipates meeting its reduction targets by halting new hires, modifying contracts and cutting planned IT investments.

Congressional leaders are set to meet with President Obama at the White House on Friday to discuss replacing the sequester.

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A fluent secretary of state

This just in from our colleague Anne Gearan, who’s playing the role of foreign correspondent as she covers Secretary of State John Kerry’s first official overseas jaunt:

During his failed 2004 presidential run, Kerry may have been ridiculed as a French-speaking, windsurfing East Coast aristocrat, but he was in his element in Paris on Wednesday. He spoke in effortless French, with a good accent to boot, to open a news conference with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Gearan reports.

“We just finished one of those wonderful French lunches that have been drawing Americans to Paris for centuries,” Kerry said en français. He praised France as America’s oldest ally, among other niceties. Then, with a wry smile, he said it was time to switch to English, “because otherwise I would not be allowed to return back home.”

A day earlier, Kerry tried out his German in Berlin. Pretty good was the verdict of an unscientific sampling of German reporters. On Thursday, Kerry gets a chance to show off his Italian in Rome.

Of course, when he arrives in the Eternal City, he can always rely on his old Yale roommate, U.S. Ambassador David Thorne, if he needs any translation help.

Weather, or not

Way back in 2001, a bipartisan group of House members formed the Climate Change Caucus, with a goal that at the time didn’t sound so radical: tackling the threat of global warming.

Flash forward nearly 12 years and the politics are very different. In a sign of just how things have changed, this month, another group formed. Its name is the rather euphemistic “Safe Climate Caucus,” and its membership doesn’t include a single Republican.

Members of the new group, spearheaded by Rep. Henry Waxman

(D-Calif.), have promised to take the bold step of . . . talking about climate change every day on the House floor.

The name seems a bit of clever branding. After all, it’s practically mainstream to deny “climate change,” but who doesn’t want a “safe climate”? We hear Waxman picked the moniker to focus on the “heart of the issue.”

The now-defunct Climate Change Caucus was led by former Reps. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) and John Olver (D-Mass.), and the enterprise petered out after Gilchrest was defeated in 2008.

Gilchrest, now director of Maryland’s Sassafras Environmental Education Center, wasn’t surprised to hear that the Climate Change Caucus had disbanded, or that no Republicans had joined the new group. But he’s unimpressed with any rebranding efforts. “It’s a little silly to call it anything but what it is,” he said.

Guess it will take more than that for the GOP to warm to the effort.

Nice while it lasted

House Speaker John Boehner, citing the impending sequester cuts to the federal budget, Wednesday canceled all House codel (congressional delegation) travel on military jets, our colleague Paul Kane
reported, citing GOP sources in the room.

Members may still be able to fly commercially, however.

Of course, as we noted the other day, that spectacular perk — full-service, business-class-only travel — was apt to be a sequester casualty anyway, for both the House and the Senate.

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Federal prison guard slain at Pennsylvania facility

A corrections officer at the Canaan federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania was killed by an inmate late Monday night, according to prison officials, marking the first slaying of a federal prison guard in nearly five years.

Officer Eric Williams, 34, of Nanticoke, Pa., was working in a housing unit at the high-security federal facility in Northeast Pennsylvania when he was beaten and fatally stabbed with a homemade weapon, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Williams had served with the bureau for less than two years, the agency said.

“This is clearly the darkest day in our institution’s short history, and we are in shock over this senseless loss of a colleague and friend,” David Ebbert, Canaan’s warden, said in a statement Tuesday.

The bureau said that an investigation into Williams’s death was underway and that prison staff had restrained an individual after the incident.

Union officials mourned Williams’s death but also seized on the incident to criticize Washington for the government-wide spending cuts that are set to take effect Friday if Congress fails to reach an alternative deficit-reduction deal. They said the threat of staffing reductions could put corrections officers at greater risk.

“With furloughs, I shudder to think of what could happen,” said Dale Deshotel, president of the Council of Prison Locals. “If you start furloughing people, you remove another percentage of the officers, and it’s going to get even more dangerous.”

The bureau did not address the cuts, but the agency said its facilities would benefit from more personnel.

“Staffing has always been an issue,” spokesman Chris Burke said. “It’s safe to say that higher staffing levels do contribute to safer institutions.”

The attack on Monday occurred while Williams was locking prisoners into their cells for the night, according to union officials who had spoken with other guards at the facility. Williams was unarmed and working alone at the time, union officials said.

The bureau generally prohibits corrections officers from carrying weapons at work, although a few exceptions apply: Guards can use batons during emergency situations, and a few prisons have allowed personnel to carry pepper spray as part of a pilot program. Canaan is not one of those facilities.

Another officer who arrived to assist Williams with a routine inmate count discovered the officer’s stabbed and beaten body, union officials said.

They said that corrections officers should not have to work alone and that they have lobbied Congress for several years to provide more personnel funding.

“Staffing levels contributed to this death,” said Darrell Palmer, president of the AFGE Local 3003, of which Williams was a member. “It all comes down to the things we’ve been asking for since José Rivera passed away.”

Rivera was stabbed at the Atwater penitentiary in California in 2008, according to the Council of Prison Locals.

Local 3003 officials wrote to Congress less than nine days before the officer’s death, urging lawmakers to oppose any measure that would reduce pay, retirement or benefits for its members. The message referred to Rivera’s 2008 murder as an example of the dangers prison authorities face.

The Justice Department said the automatic spending cuts set to take place Friday would force the Bureau of Prisons to trim $338 million from its budget, requiring 12 days of furloughs for all employees within the agency.

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In Oklahoma, tiny airport attracts federal money, but few planes

ARDMORE, Okla. — Along a country road in southern Oklahoma, there is a place that doesn’t make sense. It is an airport without passengers.

Or, for that matter, planes.

This is Lake Murray State Park Airport, one of the least busy of the nation’s 3,300-plus public airfields. In an entire week here, there might be one landing and one takeoff — often so pilots can use the bathroom. Or none at all. Visiting pilots are warned to watch out for deer on the runway.

So why is it still open? Mostly, because the U.S. government insists on sending it money.

Every year, Oklahoma is allotted $150,000 in federal funding because of this place, the result of a grant program established 13 years ago, in Congress’s golden age of pork. The same amount goes to hundreds of other tiny airfields across the country — including more than 80 like this one, with no paying customers and no planes based at the field.

Lake Murray, as it turns out, is an ATM shaped like an airport.

It’s also an example of the kind of spending — wide-ranging, constituent-pleasing giveaways — that Washington has struggled to swear off in this time of austerity. Once again, for example, Congress voted to continue giving money to local airports last year. And in Oklahoma, state officials voted to keep the airport open and, therefore, be able to take it.

“This is a direct gift from your congressman and senators,” said Victor Bird, director of the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission, which handles the money the government allots for Lake Murray. “Everybody’s going to get something here, and we’re going to take some.”

For advocates of leaner government, the story of Lake Murray’s airport is particularly galling now, as an $85 billion budget cut nears on Friday. The “sequester,” as the cut is known, is what lawmakers call a “dumb cut,” because it doesn’t try to distinguish muscle from fat.

Within the Federal Aviation Administration, for instance, officials say the sequester could result in the closure of air-traffic control towers and long flight delays. But it would not touch the airport program, which has allotted Lake Murray about $1,500 for each of its takeoffs and landings.

“Why have we not gotten rid of the stupid stuff in the federal government?” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who highlighted Lake Murray in his annual “Wastebook” last year. “Because every one of these . . . stupid or irresponsible projects has a constituency.”

The story of Lake Murray’s airfield starts in the early 1960s. At that point, Congress was not involved: The airport was intended to function as an airport. The state parks department hoped the field would draw high-rolling visitors with their own planes.

At first, they came. Now, they generally don’t.

“There’s an airplane!” Wesley Chaney, the state park’s head golf pro, said one afternoon this month. At that moment, this was surprising — and worrying — news. Chaney was standing smack in the middle of the runway.

“That’s a bird,” Richard Keithley, another parks employee, told him.

There was no plane coming. In the wide blue Oklahoma sky, in fact, the only things aloft were jumbo jets passing at high altitude and a few circling buzzards.

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Legislative branch prepares for spending cuts

Lawmakers will return to work Monday after a week-long break, with $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to take effect in four days.

Congressional offices and agencies have remained largely quiet on the issue compared with the executive branch, where top officials — from President Obama to Cabinet members such as Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta — have warned against the budget cuts known as sequestration, in speeches and with testimonies before congressional committees.

But that doesn’t mean the legislative branch would escape cuts.

The sequester would not affect lawmaker salaries, since their pay does not come from discretionary spending. But the reductions would hit their individual offices, as well as all legislative-branch agencies such as the Library of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office and U.S. Capitol Police.

Agencies that have sent letters to employees have noted similar strategies: imposing hiring freezes, reducing travel expenses, trimming funding for technology upgrades and reworking some contracts.

Furloughs stand out as one of the greatest concerns among federal workers, because they mean less pay for the year and fewer days for employees to do their jobs.

Some congressional agencies have said they expect to avoid unpaid leave if the sequester happens, while others have said they may resort to the measure for a few days.

The Government Accountability Office told employees in a memo last week that furloughs probably wouldn’t be necessary for the agency, based on the latests estimates for a reduction target.

“We have been allocating our funds since the start of the fiscal year in a very conservative manner, recognizing that sequestration might go into effect,” Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro said in the memo.

“We project that we would no longer require furloughs at GAO this year to absorb the potential reduction associated with sequestration,” Dodaro added.

Likewise, a spokesman for the Architect of the Capitol said in an e-mail last week that the organization doesn’t think furloughs will be necessary to meet the reduction target.

What remains to be seen is just what the reduction targets would be. The latest estimate from the White House budget office said the sequester would require across-the-board cuts of “roughly 5 percent for non-Defense programs.”

The Congressional Budget Office calculated 5.3 percent for the same category.

Even based on those estimates, some legislative agencies don’t think they can avoid furloughs under the sequester.

The Library of Congress last week warned its employees that the cuts would probably require four days of unpaid leave, with individual workers scheduling one of those days in coordination with supervisors, while the other three would come during library closings at times when the facilities would normally be open.

The Government Printing Office wasn’t so specific, saying by e-mail that “furloughs may also have to be implemented” in addition to plans for a hiring freeze, limits on overtime and reductions in travel and training.

Although the sequester could have an impact on lawmakers’ local and Capitol Hill offices, it remains unclear how many members of Congress would impose layoffs, furloughs or pay cuts to meet the reduction targets. Only those who expect to avoid such measures commented for this report.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said his office prepared for the sequester during the past year by stopping pay raises, reducing travel, eliminating its staff retreat and cutting back on mailings — resorting to more cost-effective digital communications instead.

“We’ve kept awfully lean this year just on the assumption that this might happen,” Cole said. “We’ll make the adjustments, but we won’t have to furlough and we won’t reduce services in terms of case work or answering constituent questions.”

The automatic cuts were established with the intent that they would be so undesirable that lawmakers would be motivated to reach a budget compromise. But with the cuts days away and Democrats and Republicans as far apart as ever, observers say the reductions appear to be inevitable.

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Senators near a deal on background checks for most private gun sales

A bipartisan group of senators is on the verge of a deal that would expand background checks to all private firearms sales with limited exemptions, but significant disagreements remain on the issue of keeping records of private gun sales, according to aides familiar with the talks.

An agreement would be a bold first step toward consideration of legislation to limit gun violence in the wake of the mass shootings at a Connecticut elementary school in December and comes as the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected this week to begin considering new proposals to limit gun violence.

The talks, led by two Democrats and two Republicans, are expected to earn more GOP support in the coming days and likely enough to move the bill through the Senate, according to senior aides of both parties who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“These negotiations are challenging, as you’d expect on an issue as complicated as guns,” the chief negotiator, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), said in a statement Saturday. “But all of the senators involved are approaching this in good faith. We are all serious about wanting to get something done, and we are going to keep trying.”

Resolution of whether to keep records of private sales is key to earning the support of one of the Republicans involved in the talks, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who has a solid A-rating from the influential National Rifle Association and could provide political cover for lawmakers of both parties who are wary of supporting the plan.

Coburn has declined to comment on the talks, saying recently that “I don’t negotiate through the press.”

Democrats say that keeping records of private sales is necessary to enforce any new law and because current federal law requires licensed firearm dealers to keep records. Records of private sales also would help law enforcement trace back the history of a gun used in a crime, according to Democratic aides. Republicans, however, believe that records of private sales could put an undue burden on gun owners or could be perceived by gun rights advocates as a precursor to a national gun registry.

Coburn and Schumer are joined in their talks by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), while aides in both parties anticipate that Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Susan Collins (Maine) could also endorse the plan soon. McCain and Collins have said they generally support legislation expanding background checks, while a Flake spokeswoman said Saturday that he is still reviewing the proposal.

More Republican support is anticipated in part because the four senators involved in the talks have agreed that any new background check program would exempt private transactions between family members or people who completed a background check in order to obtain a concealed-carry permit, according to aides.

But the four senators are grappling with how to make the process of obtaining a background check as seamless as possible for private dealers while also ensuring that someone keeps a record of the transaction.

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With campaign, Mark Sanford goes from Appalachian Trail to comeback trail

BLUFFTON, S.C. — In the annals of political redemption stories, it is hard to top the one that former governor Mark Sanford (R) is attempting to write in South Carolina.

After a spectacular 2009 scandal that destroyed his marriage, spawned impeachment proceedings and saddled him with the biggest ethics fine in state history, Sanford is making a new start right back where he started his once-promising political career two decades ago — running for Congress in South Carolina’s 1st District.

The most amazing part: He’s got a good chance of winning.

“For all the obvious reasons, I thought politics was forever over for me,” Sanford said in an interview.

But in December, Jim DeMint shocked the state by leaving the Senate for a job running the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Then, Rep. Tim Scott (R) was named to fill DeMint’s seat, leaving an opening in Sanford’s old House district.

“It’s sort of a generational event. It never happens in South Carolina politics. A U.S. senator retires, and then a governor appoints, and then my phone lines light up,” Sanford said.

At the moment, Sanford is still one of 16 who are seeking the Republican nomination in a special election to fill the seat.

That means the man once touted as a GOP presidential prospect is spending his evenings in places like the Golden Corral family buffet here, where 13 of the contenders were making their cases at a Beaufort County Republican Party candidate forum Thursday night.

With each of them allotted only five minutes, Sanford, the first to speak, had an advantage that few of his rivals had, which is that people in the audience actually knew who he was.

Among his opponents was a high school economics teacher from Mount Pleasant, S.C., named Teddy Turner. He devoted his presentation to convincing the conservative audience that he had nothing in common with his father, CNN founder Ted Turner, or his former stepmother Jane Fonda, whom the younger Turner referred to as “Hanoi Jane.”

“How many of you get to pick your parents?” Turner lamented.

A few candidates later into the program, Tim Larkin, an engineer, looked around the room and declared: “I think the only folks I know here are my competitors.”

Even his opponents concede the former governor is all but certain to come in first in the March 19 primary, after which he will face the second-place finisher in a runoff two weeks later.

In a district that went nearly 60 percent for Mitt Romney in the last presidential contest, the winner of the GOP primary will have a big advantage in the May 7 special election. But that race, too, has a splash of excitement, given that the Democratic nominee is expected to be Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the sister of Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert.

As he acknowledged, Sanford is the beneficiary of a unique set of circumstances — a short race, a big field, a hefty campaign treasury (including more than $120,000 in leftover funds from his congressional races, and, with some restrictions, more than $1 million donated to his gubernatorial campaigns) and the fact that pretty much everyone in the district has seen his name on the ballot five times before.

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Group releases list of 90 medical ‘don’ts’

Don’t use feeding tubes in patients with advanced dementia. Don’t use drugs to aggressively treat diabetes in those older than 65. Don’t automati­cally use imaging technology for minor head injuries in children and headaches in adults. And don’t give antacids to babies with reflux.

Those are among the 90 medical “don’ts” on a list being released Thursday by a coalition of doctor and consumer groups. They are trying to discourage the use of tests and treatments that have become common practice but may cause harm to patients or unnecessarily drive up the cost of health care.

It is the second set of recommendations from the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s “Choosing Wisely” campaign, which launched last year amid nationwide efforts to improve medical care in the United States while making it more affordable.

The recommendations run the gamut, from geriatrics to opthalmology to maternal health. Together, they are meant to convey the message that in medicine, “sometimes less is better,” said Daniel Wolfson, executive vice president of the foundation, which funded the effort.

“Sometimes, it’s easier [for a physician] to just order the test rather than to explain to the patient why the test is not necessary,” Wolfson said. But “this is a new era. People are looking at quality and safety and real outcomes in different ways.”

The guidelines were penned by more than a dozen medical professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and ­Gynecologists.

The groups discourage the use of antibiotics in a number of instances in which they are commonly prescribed, such as for sinus infections and pink eye. They caution against using certain sedatives in the elderly and cold medicines in the very young.

In some cases, studies show that the test or treatment is costly but does not improve the quality of care for the patient, according to the groups.

But in many cases, the groups contend, the intervention could cause pain, discomfort or even death. For example, feeding tubes are often used to provide sustenance to dementia patients who cannot feed themselves, even though oral feeding is more effective and humane. And CT scans that are commonly used when children suffer minor head trauma may expose them to cancer-causing radiation.

While the recommendations are aimed in large part at physicians, they are also designed to arm patients with more information in the exam room.

“If you’re a healthy person and you’re having a straightforward surgery, and you get a list of multiple tests you need to have, we want you to sit down and talk with your doctor about whether you need to do these things,” said John Santa, director of the health ratings center at Consumer Reports, which is part of the coalition that created the guidelines.

Health-care spending in the United States has reached 17.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and continues to rise, despite efforts to contain costs. U.S. health-care spending grew 3.9 percent in 2011, reaching $2.7 trillion, according to the journal Health Affairs.

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As sequester nears, Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale at center of storm

Pentagon comptroller Robert F. Hale is overseeing the Defense Department’s plans to furlough most of its 800,000 civilian workers, but he insists that he still meets with friendly faces as he strides down the building’s corridors.

“I teasingly say, ‘When I walk down the hall, people still wave, but with fewer fingers,’ ” said Hale, who is balancing the tension and frustration of the times with a bit of wit.

As the Defense Department’s chief financial officer and principal adviser on all fiscal matters, including the Pentagon’s annual budget of more than $600 billion, the 66-year-old Hale and his office are at the focal point of a budget crisis.

“I think all of us realized a couple of months ago we were heading for the perfect storm, and we’re in the middle of it at the moment,” he said during an interview Wednesday, a particularly tumultuous day.

“This is furlough day,” Hale noted.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta was giving Congress a formal 45-day notice required by law, as well as a message to the Defense Department workforce worldwide: In the event of sequestration, the Pentagon will move forward with furloughs.

Preparing for the furloughs, Hale said, is “frankly one of the most distasteful tasks I have faced in four years” as comptroller.

A square-jawed and amiable former Navy officer, Hale served as Air Force comptroller during the Clinton administration and before that for 12 years as head of the national security division at the Congressional Budget Office. But he considers the present situation “unparalleled” in his experience.

Hale had readied for the day’s tasks while riding in a Defense Department car from his home in Annandale to the Pentagon, dressed in a comptroller’s uniform — a dark business suit, white shirt and checked tie.

Arriving in his E-Ring office overlooking the Pentagon’s Mall entrance by 7 a.m., Hale prepared e-mails to the department’s senior leadership alerting them of Panetta’s pending actions. While Panetta’s message was being delivered in a letter to Capitol Hill and via e-mail to the workforce, Hale conferred with Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in preparation for a Friday conference to coordinate sequestration with the senior Pentagon leadership.

“Not to say they aren’t frustrated, but they don’t blame it on me,” he said, especially conscious of the toll the turmoil is taking on officials and rank and file alike.

At 11 a.m. he was participating in a teleconference with worried defense agency heads from around the country. “They’ve got thousands of people affected by this,” Hale said.

At 1 p.m., he went before the Pentagon press corps to brief reporters about the budget developments, warning grimly that the cuts could leave the military unprepared to respond to contingencies but also joking that solving the sequestration issue would allow him to “spend more time with my wife.”

Hale rejected criticism voiced during Capitol Hill hearings last week that the Pentagon should have started making budget plans for sequestration much earlier.

“If we’d done this six months ago, we would have caused the degradation in productivity and morale that we’re seeing now among our civilians,” he said.

Hale does not have to travel far within the Pentagon to find disquiet about the situation. Many of the 160 employees of the comptroller’s office face furlough.

“They’re frustrated, angry, worried,” he said. “My own staff, several people are saying, ‘I’m just going to retire. I don’t want to do this anymore,’ and I can’t blame them. I mean, we’re talking about 20 percent pay cuts for five to six months. Some of these people aren’t going to be able to pay their rent.”

The irony of furloughing the budget staff in the midst of a budget crisis does not escape Hale. “It sure won’t help,” he said.

“You’re replanning your budget for one of the world’s largest organizations, something that we would normally do over six months, in a couple of weeks, so it’s a very compressed period,” he said.

Yet the comptroller said he is willing to stay on for a time if asked to remain when a replacement for Panetta is confirmed by the Senate.

“I’d like to help the department get through whatever’s coming in the next few months and then plot a course from there,” he said.

“It’s satisfying in the sense of helping a major organization and a very important one get through tough times,” Hale added.

Perspective makes a difference, too.

“Nobody’s shooting at me, as is happening to some of our folks in Afghanistan,” Hale said. “So I don’t believe by any means I have the toughest job in the Department of Defense, or even close.”

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the Post’s Politics Discussion Forums.

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Denmark on the radar?

Rufus Gifford, former Democratic National Committee finance chairman and more recently President Obama’s near-legendary 2012 campaign fundraising chief, is said to be the leading pick for ambassador to Denmark.

Gifford, an indefatigable — some beleaguered donors have said maybe too indefatigable — fundraiser, was the key person behind the campaign’s $1 billion war chest.

The longtime Democratic fundraiser and activist in the gay community would be the second openly gay U.S. ambassador to a NATO ally. The first, James Hormel, served in the latter part of President Bill Clinton’s second term as ambassador to Luxembourg.

Gifford’s ex-partner
Jeremy Bernard — also a formidable fundraiser and major Democratic pol — is the first man and the first openly gay person to be White House social secretary. Gifford and Bernard, who remain good friends, had been called one of Washington’s top “power couples.”

The gay community had been pushing since the election for an openly gay appointee to a top-tier ambassadorship. While Denmark may not rank with places like Britain, Germany and France, its population, at 5.6 million, is more than 10 times that of Luxembourg. And Denmark has sent hundreds of troops to support the U.S.-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gifford would succeed prominent Washington lawyer and Obama bundler Laurie Susan Fulton, who left this month after a somewhat uneven tour.

Loop Fans may recall a 2011 item about an inspector general’s report that criticized her for not delegating authority and being “harsh” when she finds fault with her staff. “Where she perceives lapses,” the report said, “her response has been sharp and, to those affected, frequently unpredictable.”

MALL VU! MUST SEE!

Hot real estate news on Capitol Hill — and it has nothing to do with a trendy condo development.

One of the most impressive properties in the Capitol building is opening up. The death of Sen. Daniel Inouye

(D-Hawaii) late last year means that the lovely “hideaway” office he occupied will soon be available.

Inouye was the chamber’s most senior member, meaning he had dibs on the choicest of all the private hideaways — those offices in the Capitol building given to senators in addition to their official spaces. His was a second-floor office on the Capitol’s tony West Front, with sweeping views down the Mall, that was occupied by the librarian of Congress before the library moved into its own space in 1897.

The former library spaces, which were also later used by the Supreme Court before the justices decamped in 1935, are said to be breathtaking, with crystal chandeliers, marble fireplaces and mahogany galore.

Since Inouye’s death, the hideaway has undergone a refurbishment — nothing major, just a little spiffing up, we hear. And soon, the process of passing it on will begin.

Typically, hideaways are offered to senators in order of seniority, which means the space will be made available to the chamber’s now-most-senior members. With the addition of the office space inside the Capitol Visitors Center, even the most junior senator has at least a closet-size hideaway to call his or her own.

But those next in line for the Inouye digs, including Sens.
Patrick Leahy
(D-Vt.) and
Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah), already have pretty swanky spaces that they may not want to leave.

Some senators make their hideaways semi-public spaces where they hold meetings with staffers and visiting constituents, while others prefer to keep them very exclusive — keeping their locations secret so they can slip away from colleagues, reporters, maybe even their own staff members.

Gitmo bedtime stories

Ever wonder what books terrorists like to read? Probably not, but it seems some like to read about themselves or alleged close pals.

Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who is accused of having helped and trying to join the Sept. 11, 2001 , terrorists — but was denied a visa four times — isn’t into snuggling up with what the others at Guantanamo Bay favored.

As we noted in August, the most popular items borrowed from the prison library were early episodes of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — the sitcom had replaced the Harry Potter book series atop the list of items requested by detainees.

Binalshibh, however, prefers more intense fare.

At the military trial in Gitmo of the 9/11 conspirators, we find Binalshibh, who reportedly had spoken of his role in the attacks with an al-Jazeera reporter, had in his cell two volumes of the 9/11 Commission report and the books “The Black Banners” and “Perfect Soldiers,” according to the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare blog.

“The Black Banners” — styled as “The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda” — is the 2011 memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan. Binalshibh is oft-mentioned in the book, which he had despites its apparently being banned in the prison.

The second book, Terry McDermott’s “Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They were, Why They Did It,” is all about Binalshibh and his pals.

Probably bookmarked the references to his own alleged activities.

With Emily Heil

The blog: washingtonpost.com/
intheloop. Twitter: @InTheLoopWP.

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President’s Day, by George

Did you enjoy that relaxing three-day weekend? Caught up on sleep, maybe sneaked in a movie or a few errands?

That’s no thanks to Rep. Frank Wolf
(R-Va.), who’s playing the role of the Grinch Who Wants to Steal Presidents’ Day.

Wolf recently reintroduced a bill that would do away with the congressionally established Monday holiday (it’s set for the third Monday of the month) and instead designate it as Feb. 22 — George Washington’s actual birthday. This year, that date falls on a Friday, which means we’d still have a three-day weekend. But that won’t happen every year.

Wolf thinks that by celebrating on an arbitrary Monday, the American people are missing out on the chance to truly remember the life and legacy of our first president (who, like Wolf, hails from the Commonwealth).

He bemoaned many schoolkids’ ignorance on the subject. “Congress has unwittingly contributed to this lack of historical understanding by relegating Washington’s Birthday to the third Monday of February to take advantage of a three-day weekend,” Wolf said in a statement entered into the Congressional Record. “We need to change the focus from celebrating sales at the mall to celebrating the significance of President Washington’s birth to the birth of our nation.”

Wolf even trotted out endorsements of the idea from presidential scholar and author
David McCullough
and from Jim Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon.

But what would happen to all those great Presidents’ Day deals on mattresses?

New blood

As key members of Team Obama move on, a new study finds that President Obama is beginning his second term with fewer than a third of the senior staff members who made up his original team — a level of turnover that’s pretty typical among modern second terms.

The report from the Brookings Institution shows that 71 percent of Obama’s “A-team” has left, compared with 78 percent for Ronald Reagan, 74 percent for Bill Clinton and 63 percent for George W. Bush.

The paper also examines the importance of senior staff to the president and the toll that turnover takes: “a loss of institutional memory, time lost hiring and orienting a successor, the disappearance of unique networking contacts.”

Most companies in the private sector would consider the typical White House turnover rates “unthinkable.”

But there’s a silver lining here, the author suggests. Second-term hiring affords the White House the chance to bring in new blood and fresh ideas. And it could assuage “disgruntled” constituencies by hiring from their ranks. “Repaying political debts could advance the president’s efforts to pursue a vigorous legislative agenda,” they write.

And finally, a bit of advice: in Obama’s second term, the paper assesses the president’s agenda and suggests that Team Obama recruit from Capitol Hill, which could “provide necessary expertise for the legislative battles that lie ahead. ”

Out of Africa, and back in

Democratic National Committee Executive Director
Patrick Gaspard
, former political director in the Obama White House, appears to be the administration’s pick to be the next ambassador to South Africa.

Gaspard, a major player in New York City politics — he was a campaign staffer for former mayor David Dinkins, for example — was a top operative of the Service Employees International Union and a political organizer.

He also was actively involved in organizing efforts in the 1980s and ’90s to topple South Africa’s apartheid regime. While in the White House, Gaspard, a Haitian American, was also a key player in U.S. relief efforts in Haiti after a powerful earthquake devastated the country three years ago.

Although he grew up in New York City, Gaspard was born in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after his Haitian-born parents moved there for his father’s teaching job. The family moved to New York when he was 3.

Kerry on

Another longtime aide to Secretary of State John F. Kerry is taking a senior post at the State Department. David McKean is to be director of policy planning, a plum position created in 1947 by George F. Kennan and held in later years by foreign policy heavy hitters such as Paul H. Nitze, Mort Halperin and Richard N. Haass.

McKean became the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s staff director when Kerry took over the committee in 2009 and was his Senate office chief of staff from 1999 to 2008. He left the committee in early 2011.

McKean was also CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston and has written three books on U.S. political history.

Last April, McKean become a senior adviser to then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, assessing State Department operations. Ought to come in handy as Kerry takes over. And his long relationship with Kerry should enable him to provide candid advice — a valuable commodity in this town.

With Emily Heil

The blog: washingtonpost.com/
intheloop. Twitter: @InTheLoopWP.

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Congressional staffers often travel on tabs of foreign governments

About a dozen congressional staffers flew business class on a trip to China last summer and stayed at luxury hotels while touring the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and receiving a “briefing on ancient artifacts and dynasties” at the Shanghai Museum.

The all-expenses-paid visit came courtesy of China. The Chinese government hosted a day of meetings with officials in Beijing followed by eight days packed with outings to destinations often frequented by tourists along with a stop at a missile frigate and two others related to national security — the official theme of the trip.

More and more foreign governments are sponsoring such excursions for lawmakers and their staffs, though an overhaul of ethics rules adopted by Congress five years ago banned them from going on most other types of free trips. This overseas travel is often arranged by lobbyists for foreign governments, though lobbyists were barred from organizing other types of congressional trips out of concern that the trips could be used to buy favor.

The overseas travel is covered by an exemption Congress granted itself for trips deemed to be cultural exchanges.

A Washington Post examination of congressional disclosures revealed the extent of this congressional travel for the first time, finding that Hill staffers had reported taking 803 such trips in the six years ending in 2011. Lawmakers themselves are increasingly participating, disclosing 21 trips in 2011, more than double the figure in prior years.

The number of congressional trips could be far higher, because only lawmakers and senior congressional staff members are required to disclose the travel. A former senior aide on a congressional committee said that junior staffers were usually sent on the trips because they rarely had the chance to take official trips paid for the U.S. government.

Some Hill employees have gone on repeated trips to the same country, and others chain them together, traveling directly from one expenses-paid visit to another.

China is by far the biggest sponsor of these trips, with senior staffers reporting more than 200 trips there over the six-year period, according to The Post’s review of 130,000 pages of disclosures collected by the Web site Legi­Storm. Taiwan accounts for an additional 100 trips.

But other regions of the world are also well represented.

On a trip to Jordan, for instance, congressional staffers stayed at the Four Seasons in Amman, where they received an audience with the king. The group also visited the Dead Sea and the famed mosaics in Madaba and spent spent two days at the ancient cities of Petra and Jerash, according to an itinerary for the trip.

In Switzerland, staffers took a helicopter ride through the Alps to Monte Bre, hiking up the mountain for coffee at a summit cafe overlooking a lake, according to another itinerary.

Organizers of the trips say they’re an important way for U.S. government staff members to learn about the world with no cost to taxpayers. The trips are supposed to include visits to historical and cultural sites, including those frequented by tourists, to foster international understanding.

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Dominican Republic port contract scrutinized, along with senator, eye doctor’s relationship

SANTO DOMINGO — When the U.S. Embassy set out to press the Dominican government over a long-stalled contract to provide port security, American officials took on some tough opponents. The deal had languished for more than a decade amid stiff resistance from the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents the interests of American and local businessmen in the Dominican Republic, and the country’s customs authorities.

Ambassador Raul Yzaguirre’s team pushed the government to enforce the contract — which calls for operating X-ray scanners to screen cargo at the country’s ports — despite objections over its merits and its price tag.

The port deal has come under heightened scrutiny in the United States in recent weeks because of its chief investor, a wealthy Florida eye doctor named Salomon Melgen who stood to gain a windfall if the contract was enforced, and his close friend Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).

Menendez, whose relationship with Melgen is the subject of a Senate ethics inquiry, was a major beneficiary of the doctor’s generosity, repeatedly flying on his private plane to the Dominican Republic, staying as a guest at his seaside mansion and receiving large campaign contributions. Melgen donated $700,000 to Menendez and other Senate Democrats last year. The senator was also the most powerful champion of the port deal, publicly urging U.S. officials to pressure Dominican authorities to enforce the contract.

Menendez pointed to the port security deal at Yzaguirre’s confirmation hearing to become ambassador, an aide to the senator said, asking him to put a priority on security efforts aimed at countering drug trafficking through the Dominican Republic. Melgen, too, sought Yzaguirre’s help in enforcing the contract.

Yzaguirre, for his part, received help from both men in becoming ambassador. They had provided a crucial boost to his nomination when it ran into trouble.

The details of efforts by Yzaguirre and embassy staff on behalf of the port security contract remain sketchy. But the ambassador spoke approvingly of stepping up drug interdiction measures when Dominican reporters specifically asked him about the port deal. And embassy officials told the American Chamber of Commerce that they were seeking a resolution of the contract favorable to an American investor, according to William Malamud, the chamber’s executive vice president.

Though it was unusual for a U.S. Embassy to cross swords with the local American chamber, embassy officials said they were doing what U.S. diplomats around the world do when American investors get ensnared in legal or bureaucratic problems.

But this was no routine case because of the relationship among the three men: the senator, the eye doctor and the envoy.

When Yzaguirre’s nomination in 2009 to become ambassador to the Dominican Republic was held up by Republicans in Congress over other disputes with the State Department, Melgen and Menendez came to his aid. At the time, Menendez chaired the subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that handled Caribbean affairs. With the nomination stalled, Melgen contacted Menendez to see what the senator could do to move it along, according to Melgen’s lawyer.

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Jesse Jackson Jr. charged with conspiracy

The downward spiral for former congressman Jesse L. Jackson Jr. took another dramatic turn Friday when federal prosecutors in Washington laid out their criminal case against the once-promising Illinois Democrat, accusing him of misusing campaign funds to benefit himself and his wife. Among the purchases were fur coats, a high-end watch and a football autographed by presidents.

Jackson was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit false statements, mail fraud and wire fraud in the misuse of approximately $750,000 in campaign funds, according to court papers filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The court filing was a clear signal that Jackson, who served in the House of Representatives, intended to plead guilty to the charge, which has a maximum penalty of five years in prison. No court date has been set.

Jackson’s expected plea would be another mile-marker in his slow political and personal collapse, which began shortly after President Obama’s 2008 election. That had seemed to open up new possibilities for Jackson, considered a likely successor to Obama in the Senate.

Instead, FBI agents arrested then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) and charged him with trying to sell the interim appointment to the Senate seat from Illinois to the highest bidder, and Jackson was implicated in the scandal. Though not charged, he would never recover politically.

According to the documents released Friday, Jackson used campaign funds to buy a $43,350 gold Rolex watch along with almost $10,000 in children’s furniture that he had delivered to his home in the District.

Among other allegations, prosecutors say Jackson made direct expenditures from the campaign’s accounts of about $57,793 for personal expenses. The documents say that he and a co-conspirator used a campaign credit card to make $582,773 worth of purchases for their own use.

Jackson’s wife, former Chicago alderman Sandra Stevens Jackson, was not named or charged in that case, but the description makes clear that she was the co-conspirator.

“That’s a big number as these things go,” said Stan Brand, a former House counsel who has represented defendants in this type of case. “That obviously isn’t the kind of case you would risk putting in front of a jury. That’s why people plead.”

The details of the case against Jackson were part of a document known as a “criminal information,” which cannot be filed without the consent of the defendant and which signals that a plea agreement is near.

Jackson’s wife was charged with filing false income-tax returns from 2006 through 2011, according to a separate criminal information in her case. That charge has a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

Attempts to reach the Jacksons for comment were unsuccessful, but news reports in the Chicago media quote statements, issued by their attorneys, in which the pair take responsibility for their conduct.

Through a representative, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jackson’s father, declined to comment on the charges.

The criminal documents outline a series of illegal expenditures from the former congressman’s campaign account, including more than a dozen purchases of pop-culture artifacts that revealed his place firmly as a child of the 1970s and 1980s:

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Postmaster takes case for five-day mail delivery to skeptical senators

Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe took his controversial plan for five-day mail delivery before a congressional hearing Wednesday, where he told senators that the Postal Service “needs your help.”

Donahoe’s refrain was familiar.

●The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is losing $25 million a day.

●Last year, the Postal Service lost $15.9 billion.

●It defaulted on $11.1 billion owed to the Treasury.

As he has before, Donahoe pleaded with Congress, this time the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to approve comprehensive postal reform legislation. Now, more than before, it looks as though Congress will do so.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, told the Senate panel that after two months of negotiations, “we are close, very close” to agreement on a bipartisan, bicameral bill.

Without some assistance from Congress, said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate committee, “the Postal Service will drift toward insolvency and, eventually, the point at which it must shut its doors. . . . We have never been closer to losing the Postal Service.”

Although in some ways Donahoe’s appearance echoed his many other pleas for congressional action, this hearing drew a standing-room-only crowd on the third floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. That was probably influenced by all the attention generated by his surprise announcement last week that Saturday mail delivery will end in August.

Donahoe’s written testimony outlined several key legislative goals, but five-day mail delivery was not specifically listed among them. After repeatedly urging Congress to end the six-day requirement, Donahoe said postal officials had determined that he could take that action without congressional approval.

Moving to five-day delivery would close just 10 percent of the postal budget gap, Donahoe said, yet the controversy surrounding it stole the focus from other important financial issues.

Among them is a controversial proposal to move postal employees from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which serves all federal workers, to a health insurance program run by the USPS.

Donahoe presented an updated health insurance proposal, but it received little attention compared with his five-day delivery plan.

Last year the Senate approved legislation, co-sponsored by Carper, that would allow five-day delivery two years after its enactment. The delay was designed to allow the Postal Service to study the impact of five-day delivery. Carper was among those who have expressed disappointment with Donahoe’s plan to implement it unilaterally.

“We are taking every reasonable and responsible step in our power to strengthen our finances immediately,” Donahoe told the committee. “We would urge Congress to eliminate any impediments to our new delivery schedule.

“Although discussion about our delivery schedule gets a lot of attention, it is just one important part of a larger strategy to close our budgetary gap,” he added. “It accounts for $2 billion in cost reductions while we are seeking to fill a $20 billion budget gap.”

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Obama urges a move away from narrow focus on politics of austerity

Just about every argument in Washington since the 2010 midterm elections, which returned control of the House to Republicans, has centered on reducing the federal deficit. On Tuesday night, President Obama leaned into his second term by declaring that a single-minded focus on deficit reduction would jeopardize the nation’s future. And he sounded an urgent call to rebuild.

Reelected by an ascendent coalition, the president spoke from a position of strength in his fourth State of the Union address. The economy is improving. The Republican Party is in disarray. The time has come, Obama indicated, to pivot away from the politics of austerity.

“Most of us agree that a plan to reduce the deficit must be part of the agenda,” he said. “But let’s be clear: Deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan. A growing economy that creates good middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.”

The president rejected the fiscal brinkmanship that defined the past two years. Instead, he framed future fiscal debates as opportunities to shape a “smarter government” — one with new investments in science and innovation, with a rising minimum wage, with tax reform that eliminates loopholes and deductions for what the president labeled “the well-off and well-connected.”

Second-term presidents have a narrow window of time to enact significant change before they become lame ducks, and Obama, while echoing campaign themes of reinforcing the middle class, made an urgent case for a more pragmatic version of populism, one that emphasizes economic prosperity as the cornerstone of a fair society.

Over and over, he noted that the time to rebuild is now.

The “Fix-It-First” program that Obama outlined to put people to work on “urgent repairs,” such as structurally deficient bridges, bore echoes of President Bill Clinton’s call in his 1999 State of the Union address to “save Social Security first.” Clinton’s was an effective line, one that stopped — at least until President George W. Bush took office two years later — a Republican drive to use the budget surplus to cut taxes.

Although Obama’s speech lacked the conciliatory notes of some of his earlier State of the Union addresses, he did make overtures to Republicans and cited Mitt Romney, his presidential challenger, by name.

He combined tough talk about securing the border, which brought Republicans to their feet, with a pledge to entertain reasonable reforms to Medicare, the federal entitlement program that fellow Democrats are fighting to protect.

“Those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms,” he said.

Obama also pledged to cut U.S. dependence on energy imports by expanding oil and gas development. And he singled out one area where he and Romney found agreement in last year’s campaign: linking increases in the minimum wage to the cost of living.

Obama set a bipartisan tone at the start of his speech, quoting from President John F. Kennedy’s address to Congress 51 years earlier when he said, “The Constitution makes us not rivals for power, but partners for progress.”

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Furloughs likely would exceed 1 million; feds feel ‘undervalued, unappreciated’

On the day President Obama delivers his annual address to Congress, the state of the federal workforce is precarious.

It is precarious because employees are worried about their paychecks when Uncle Sam is in danger of not fully making his payroll.

They are worried that budget cuts could diminish their ability to serve citizens and fulfill agency missions.

They are worried about being disregarded and disrespected.

The latest source of worry came Friday when the White House again warned that across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester would cause “hundreds of thousands” of furloughs. That repeated a similar warning in a Jan. 14 memo from Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Yet, with the Pentagon saying that 800,000 employees in the Defense Department alone could be furloughed, expect the government-wide total to well exceed 1 million.

On March 1, federal agencies will begin implementing cuts over seven months amounting to 13 percent of the Defense budget and 9 percent of other programs, unless Congress stops the automatic reductions.

“[I]f we go past this date, there’s certainly — there’s no way to implement the sequester without significant furloughs of hundreds of thousands of federal employees,” Danny Werfel, OMB’s controller, told a press briefing Friday.

Furloughs are unpaid leave days. The number of days could vary among agencies. Whatever the number, it means less pay for federal workers who already have had their basic pay rates frozen for more than two years.

News like this leaves federal employees feeling “undervalued and unappreciated,” said William A. Brown, president of the African American Federal Executive Association. He’d like Obama to discuss “the value of federal employees” in his State of the Union address.

Obama has proposed a 1 percent raise for 2014. A 0.5 percent increase is scheduled to take effect at the end of March. The House, however, plans to vote this week on Republican-sponsored legislation that would extend the pay freeze through the end of this year.

The sequester requires the government to cut spending by $85 billion by the end of the fiscal year in September.

“These are large and arbitrary cuts, and will have severe impacts across government,” Werfel said. “Across the government we’ll see assistance programs slashed; we’ll see contracts cut; we’ll see employees out of work. And we’ll have no choice. The blunt, irresponsible and severe nature of sequestration means that we can’t plan our way out of these consequences or take steps to soften the blow.”

Even essential federal employees would be hit.

The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, would not be able to move funding from custodial work to avoid furloughing air traffic controllers. “It’s not possible to do that because the law is written with such stricture that the cuts have to be taken at such a granular level,” Werfel explained.

Exactly how the cuts play out could differ among agencies.

“In some cases, you’ll see immediate impacts,” Werfel said. “And in some cases, agencies will work out those changes to their programs and their structures over time. So there’s no easy answer to say what the world is going to look like on March 2. We just know that these impacts — while not all of them immediate — if we don’t take action, they will take place.”

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Obama keeps newspaper reporters at arm’s length

“Entertainment Tonight” scored one last year. The New York Times did not.

“The View” has gotten several. The Washington Post hasn’t had one in years.

Albuquerque radio station KOB-FM’s “Morning Mayhem” crew interviewed him in August. The last time the Wall Street Journal did so was in 2009.

America’s newspapers have trouble enough these days, what with shrinking ad revenue and straying readers. But the daily print-and-pixel press also hasn’t gotten much love lately from the biggest newsmaker in the business: President Obama.

When Obama does media interviews these days, it’s not with a newspaper. TV gets the bulk of the president’s personal attention, from his frequent appearances on “60 Minutes” to MTV to chitchats with local stations around the country. Magazines — including the New Republic, which recently landed an interview conducted by its owner, Facebook co-founder and former Obama campaign operative Chris Hughes — are a distant second, followed by radio.

Newspapers? Well, Obama may be the least newspaper-friendly president in a generation.

TV interviews enable the president to take his message directly to a wide number of viewers, largely free of the “filter” that a print interview may entail. On TV, after all, the president rarely contends with contradictory comments from opponents or the shades-of-gray context about an issue that newspaper and online stories often offer.

White House officials “have been fairly clear that broadcast interviews are a more valuable venue for them,” said David Lauter, Washington bureau chief of the Tribune Co.’s newspaper group, which includes the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. “We’ve had several conversations with them during the campaign. . . . Ultimately, their feeling was, if it doesn’t have a broadcast component, they’re not very interested.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney says it’s nothing personal. Without addressing newspapers specifically, Carney said in an e-mail that Obama’s interviews are doled out based on “the best use of the president’s time. . . . He’s done TV and print, and will continue to do both.”

But Dee Dee Myers, President Bill Clinton’s first press secretary, said Obama’s lack of interest in newspapers also reflects a changing media ecosystem. “Newspapers increasingly reach smaller audiences,” she said. What’s more, “they’re edited. You have a lot less control” over the message.

Obama was stingy with newspaper interviews when he first came to the White House in 2009, but the well has nearly dried up since the 2010 midterm election. He spoke with USA Today and the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk during the campaign last year and had an off-the-record talk (later made public) with the Des Moines Register’s editorial board in October.

Each of those interviews had strategic value. USA Today is a national paper with the second-largest circulation (after the Wall Street Journal). The Virginia and Iowa papers are in states that were critical to Obama’s reelection chances. (Despite the rare interviews, the Register endorsed Mitt Romney for president; the Pilot made no endorsement).

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