Sequester fuels sympathy pay cuts

WASHINGTON – The rush started Tuesday when the new defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, announced that he would give back a share of his salary for each day that Pentagon employees are furloughed.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama jumped in with his own show of solidarity by pledging to return to the Treasury nearly 5 percent of his $400,000 salary.

By Thursday, the Obama administration's stampede to embrace the politics of self-sacrifice was on. Cabinet secretaries practically tripped over themselves to hand over parts of their paycheck as federal workers brace for furloughs because of the across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester.

Secretary of State John Kerry said he would give 5 percent of his $200,000 government salary to charity, and the Justice Department said that, if its workers were furloughed, Attorney General Eric Holder would give up his pay for however many days his workers go without pay.

Of course, Kerry's estimated net worth exceeds $200 million and Hagel, Holder and Obama are millionaires.

By the end of the day, however, the merely affluent, at least by Washington standards, were lining up. Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary who has an estimated net worth between $93,000 and $700,000, will forgo 5 percent of her salary, her office said. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who is worth between $750,000 and $1.7 million, will also give up a portion of his pay, although Treasury officials would not specify how much.

All Cabinet secretaries make about $200,000 a year, and the richest of them have multiple millions.

Holder's net worth is estimated between $4 million and $8 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which calculates the finances of government officials based on publicly available financial disclosure forms. Hagel's latest financial disclosure documents show millions of dollars in assets in various investment accounts. The Obamas' net worth is estimated somewhere between $2.6 million and $8.3 million, thanks in large part to income from the president's book sales.

Still, not all Cabinet members were giving themselves pay cuts. Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary whose estimated net worth is as high as $5 million, had no plans to reduce her salary because her department was not expecting any furloughs, her office said. A similar dynamic has slowly been playing out on Capitol Hill, where the sequester cuts will affect the budgets of congressional offices but not members' salaries. (Like the president and Cabinet secretaries, salaries of the House and Senate are set by law.) Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the District of Columbia and its hundreds of thousands of federal employees, said last month that she would stop collecting her pay for each day federal employees were furloughed.

All this newfound altruism is forcing many others into awkward positions. The Republican leadership in the House, which has led the spare-nothing approach to budget cuts, was largely silent.

Speaker John Boehner's office would not say whether he planned to return a portion of his pay. Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, indicated through a spokeswoman that he had absolved himself from a pay cut because he had sponsored a bill that would have replaced the sequester cuts.

The Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada did not respond to inquiries about refusing pay.

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