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1986 NOVA Newsl. 1 (1986)

handle is hein.journals/novan1986 and id is 1 raw text is: NAT/ONAL ORGAN/ZAT/ON FORVC TA\CE Ne wslet Volume 10, Number 1 ;er January 1986 Historic Budget Measure Creates Probable Crisis for Victim Services On December 12, 1985, exactly fourteen months after he signed in- to law the Victims of Crime Act and Justice Assistance Act, President Reagan signed a federal budget measure that requires the elimina- tion of the federal deficit within five years. The new law, commonly known by the names of its prin- cipal co-sponsors-Phil Gramm (R- TX), Warren B. Rudman (R-NH), and Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC)- threatens the continuation of any federal support for victim services. While most victim advocates, and quite a few federal officials, spent the Christmas holidays oblivious to the implications of the measure, its impact- immediate and breathtaking -was perceived very early in the new year. For it was announced on January 15 that the automatic provisions of the new law require a cut of $5.8 billion in non-defense spending and an equal amount in defense spending in the fiscal year which began last October 1, cuts that will take effect March 1, if not sooner. Sooner may already be here for one federally-supported victim assistance program funded under In This Issue: * NOVA Faces Fiscal Emergency.............3 * S.G. Recommendations on Crime of Rape....... 3 * From the National Headquarters ..........7 the Justice Assistance Act (JAA). An informal freeze has curtailed most grant-making to national sup- port groups such as NOVA (see related story), and that freeze may become a formal rescission with- in a matter of weeks. Further, there are published reports that the largest victim- assistance program, the $70 million Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), is on some budget-cutters' priority list for reduction if not total elimina- tion. Trying to Avoid the Automatic Cuts It is the automatic features of the bipartisan Gramm-Rudman- Hollings act that have drawn the most attention. Applied to the cur- rent fiscal year, those cuts amount to 4.9 percent of already-appropri- ated defense budgets and 4.3 per- cent of non-defense spending, the percentages to be applied equally across such individual programs as VOCA and JAA. More ominously, should the fiscal 1987 budget passed by Con- gress contain about the same spen- ding levels as the current year's, the automatic cuts would be in the range of 20-30 percent, according to published estimates. No federal policymakers want to see their priority programs slash- ed at all, and certainly not to that degree. To take the most obvious example, the President and many members of Congress are deter- mined to keep defense spending somewhat above current levels. Thus, to make spending cuts on purpose instead of by a fixed percentage spread equally, the policymakers are searching for pro- grams they can cut far more substantially or even eliminate. The savings produced by such ac- tions would then cause the surviv- ing programs to receive a much smaller automatic cutback or none at all. It is the elimination-by-design process, rather than the automatic cuts, that most threatens the federal victim-assistance programs. According to some press accounts, administration officials are trying to get a jump on the cost-reduction process by slowing down spending not only in three programs ad- ministered by the Justice Depart- ment but in some thirty-seven other domestic programs as well. Even if the freezes (or spending slow-downs) are lifted in the cur- rent fiscal year (only Congress can ultimately de-fund a valid spen- ding program), they offer a good prediction of what programs the administration will ask Congress to eliminate in shaping next year's budget. Those requests will appear in the administration budget pro- posals on February 3. Two Perspectives on the Victim- Assistance Programs It will no doubt be argued that the costs of both the Justice Assistance Act (around $70 million, of which about $5 million is being This newsletter is published with funding from the Office of Justice Programs of the U.S. Department of Justice (Grant number 85-SN-CX-0006). Views expressed in the Newsletter do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of the U.S. Justice Department or of the National Organization for Victim Assistance.

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