What’s so special about meat inspectors?

I’ve been writing a lot about recent budget dealings in the House and Senate over the last few weeks. The automatic spending cuts we are currently imposing on our government are unprecedented in scale. For many agencies, the cuts are deep and difficult to work with as officials attempt to allocate their decreased resources to best meet their obligations. But for some administrators at the Agriculture Department, political grandstanding prevented any tough choices from being made.

Agriculture Secretary John Vilsack claimed that the sequester cuts would force him to furlough food inspectors, causing a shutdown in domestic meat production for as long as 15 days. This, he claimed, would take food inspectors off the floor of plants that process meat, costing $10 billion in lost production and potentially making meat scarce. Unsurprisingly, the the powerful meat inspectors unions– who don’t typically like to be threatened–pressured Members of Congress representing agricultural states to intervene on their behalf. Congress passed a spending bill last week allowing funds intended for other functions within the Agricultural Department to pay for meat inspectors.

Hooray for bipartisanship? Hardly. The bill inexplicably rewards a single agency for complaining the loudest when cuts are hurting departments nationwide. It violates two important principles that guide any good government: the rule of law and stability.

The rule of law protects us from arbitrarily imposed power. The law applies consistently to all people, suspended or altered for no one, no matter how powerful. Without it, laws cannot be objective or just; laws that vary in application become personal, aggressive, and unprincipled. When Congress exempts a particularly powerful private sector from paying the price of a law that affects many (by virtue of a fancy K Street office and a highly paid lobbying team), the rule of law is violated. Why should the meat inspectors receive their compensation and not air traffic controllers? Why should the agencies that don’t receive extra aid not take it personally?

The whole sequester process also challenges the stability of our business environment. The sequester, since passed, has been seen as a last resort. Up to its enactment, many hoped that Congress would pass mitigating legislation or even replace it to prevent the unwanted effects. Even now, the sequestration cuts are not seen as the ultimate fix for the larger budget issues. The public and industry leaders expect an even bigger budget compromise in the upcoming year, which will inevitably change the way sequestration affects many agencies. With so much up in the air, those drawing up budgets within agencies and those who do business with those agencies (like the thousands of government contractors employed in the U.S.) lack the ability to predict and plan for the future.

Sequestration is already difficult enough to swallow. Congress shouldn’t make it any more bitter by engaging in special treatment.