Obama's 5-percent pay cut: A meaningful gesture?

The president offers a symbolic gesture to show solidarity with workers affected by sequester budget cuts

President Obama
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President Obama is giving back five percent of his $400,000 salary this year, in a show of solidarity with federal workers being furloughed due to the sequester budget cuts. The president reportedly has already written the first of what will be $20,000 in checks to the Treasury. Administration officials announced Obama's decision a day after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said they were returning a share of their salaries, too, to mirror the pay that civilian employees in their department, one of the hardest hit, will lose when they are furloughed for 14 days between March, when the sequester took effect, and the end of the fiscal year in September.

The money Obama is sending back won't solve the country's budget problems, of course. "Given that the federal government spends between $300 to $400 million an hour," notes Martin Austermuhle at DCist, "Obama's contribution would fund, well, not even a second's worth of government work." Still, it's meaningful as a show of solidarity. "The real news," says Dan Amira at New York, "is that most members of Congress — the people (many of them millionaires) directly responsible for the sequester — aren't doing this, too."

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.