During a Senate subcommittee meeting earlier this week, officials said that "significant adjustments are on the way" that will ensure that every civilian or contracted defense employee will equally be impacted by budget cuts.

"When you look at the buildup over the past 12 years, the money flowed in, but the time has come where we're going to have to make some hard choices," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, according to Federal News Radio.

According to Federal News Radio, Coast Guard officials fear that 38 metric tons of cocaine could be imported into the United States if they lose physical and human resources to severe budget cuts.

Officials fear that the uptick in cocaine imports could introduce nearly $1 billion in profits for dealers, Federal News Radio says.

READ MORE at federalnewsradio.com.

But it has also created a business boom for a local man and his airplane as he helps fill the military void.

Art Nalls, a Naval Academy graduate, is a retired Marine Corps test pilot who bought and restored his own Harrier fighter jet. It's the only privately owned flying Harrier in the world.

“I do one manuever that I call the Michael Jackson Moonwalk, I make the airplane do this as I’m backing up,” Nalls says. “It can hover, it can back up, it can stop right there in front of the crowd.”

Nalls and and fellow Harrier pilot Joe Anderson are using the jet to come to the rescue of a summer favorite - the local air show, now a sequestration endangered species.

Bryan Lilley, president of this weekend's Ocean City air show, hired Nalls after the budget cuts cost him his headliner.

“I'll bet you by the end of the year you'll see four out of five air shows having canceled for 2013,” Lilley says.

“They had a drop off in sponsorships as soon as the Blue Angels announced they weren't going to make it,” Nalls says. “People asked, 'why are we gonna spend the money to sponsor an air show if the Blues aren't gonna be there?' As soon as they announced us that trend completely reversed.”

“When you look at the air show from an event perspective you have to have that WOW,” Lilley says.

With military resources like the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds grounded because of sequestration, Nalls and his team are really the only show in town. Last year they did six air shows. This year its looking like 10, maybe more, each a chance to fill the void left by the Pentagon cost cutting.

GovExec reports that the Merit Systems Protection Board, which is tasked with hearing appeals of what they call "adverse personnel actions," including furloughs, is taking a measured approach to what could become a massive amount of appeals.

The board has already received 140 appeals, mostly from FAA workers.

Multiple federal agencies, including the FAA, IRS and officials at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, have either already furloughed workers or are planning to do so.

READ MORE at govexec.com.

The letter, which was obtained by Federal News Radio, directly blames budget cuts related to sequestration as the reason that more than 3,500 civilian workers at both Walter Reed and Fort Belvoir Community Hospital will take up to 11 unpaid days off.

"The Department of Defense will need funding in other accounts that can be used to provide the warfighters with what they need to protect national security and fight the war," the letter, dated May 28, reads. "This furlough is proposed to help meet their need while avoiding a deficit of funds in Fiscal Year 2013."

According to the letter, full-time employees will be furloughed for no more than 88 work hours between July 8 and Sept. 29. The number of days which an employee will be furloughed per pay period is yet to be determined and will likely vary.

Hospital officials say that 94 percent of the civilian staff at Walter Reed and 85 percent of the civilian staff at Fort Belvoir are affected by the potential furloughs. Officials also have promised that patient care will not be affected by the cuts.

“The assessment of over 2,500 civilian positions determined that 163 staff exemptions were necessary to maintain the highest levels of care for warrior inpatients and outpatients in rehabilitation and other critical areas,” Walter Reed officials told ABC7 said in a statement.

Hospital officials have refused several opportunities to comment.

The impacted employees are from departments across the board at both hospitals, including members of the trauma team, physical therapists and nurses. They will be forced to take 11 unpaid furlough days starting in July.

Hospital officials say the furloughs affect 2,392 caregivers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. That’s 94% of the civilian staff there.

Officials say 1,163 caregivers at Fort Belvoir’s hospital in Virginia are being furloughed, affecting 85% of its civilian staff.

Officials promise patient care will not be compromised.

“The assessment of over 2,500 civilian positions determined that 163 staff exemptions were necessary to maintain the highest levels of care for warrior inpatients and outpatients in rehabilitation and other critical areas,” Walter Reed said in a statement. “Fortunately, our wounded warrior census is significantly lower than experienced during the peak wartime period, yet our staffing remains consistent with peak levels.”

Hospital officials refused ABC7’s repeated requests for an interview. But a staffer who spoke with ABC7 said employees were told not to speak with the media.

The furloughs stem from the automatic budget cuts from sequestration.

Out of the Department of Defense's 800,000 civilian workers, about 68,000 are exempt from the furloughs. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said furloughs will save the department $1.8 billion.

According to Federal Times, the GSA stands to lose $250 million in funding next year. That funding would force it to cut back on projects that find waste and fraud impacting American taxpayers.

Estimates indicate that more than $3 billion in savings could be missed due to the cuts.

READ MORE at federaltimes.com.

The furloughs of 800,000 defense department employees is sure to slow his business and so many others. Civilian workers will have to take 11 unpaid days between July 8th and October 1.

"I understand that the decision to impose furloughs imposes financial burdens on our valued employees, harms overall morale and corrodes the long-term ability of the department to carry out the national defense mission," Deparrtment of Defense head Chuck Hagel said in the memo. "I deeply regret this decision."

Congressionally mandated automatic budget cuts initially forced the Pentagon to warn that the bulk of its 800,000 civilians would be forced to take 22 unpaid days off - one in each of the last 22 weeks of the fiscal year. When lawmakers approved a new spending bill at the end of March, they gave the Pentagon greater latitude to find savings, and the furlough days were cut to 14.

Under pressure from military leaders and members of Congress, the Pentagon will allow the Navy to avoid furloughs for tens of thousands of workers at shipyards. Civilians make up the bulk of the workforce at those facilities and are key to keeping production lines going and preventing major backlogs in the repairs of ships and combat vehicles.

For restaurants like Cantina Mexicana in Crystal City, that will mean a lot of empty chairs this spring and summer.

"We're just gonna have to weather the storm and hope customers come in,” said the restaurant’s manager.

Also exempted from the furloughs will be civilian intelligence workers in the National Intelligence Program - largely the CIA. But civilians funded in the Military Intelligence Program will be subject to the unpaid days off. Those would include workers in military intelligence agencies such as Special Operations Command and the Army, Air Force and Navy intelligence offices.

Other exempt workers include civilians in the war zone and in critical public safety jobs, as well as people whose jobs are not paid for through congressional funding. As an example, some employees may be contractors or people working in facilities that pay for operations out of their earnings - such as some jobs in recreation or foreign military sales. Overall, defense officials say that about 15 percent of the department's civilian workforce will be exempt from the furloughs.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing deliberations.

Defense and military officials have been debating for weeks how to divide up the $7.5 billion-plus it now has the authority to shift from lower priority accounts to more vital operations and maintenance programs. While some argued to use the money to reduce or eliminate furlough days, others said it should be directed at other priorities, including flight and combat training and the massive effort to bring tons of equipment out of Afghanistan.

The Defense Department received authority from Congress to shift about $7.5 billion, and officials said the department has been able to identify at least another $1 billion that can be moved in smaller increments from other accounts and doesn't require congressional approval.

Early on, Navy officials said they thought they may get authority to move as much as $750 million into operations and maintenance accounts, and top leaders pressed for the ability to use the money to eliminate the need to furlough any of their 200,000 naval civilians.

Other military and defense leaders, however, argued for a "one team, one fight" process, insisting that all military civilians should be treated the same and given equal days off without pay.

The Air Force and Army also wanted to use some of the money to fund other priorities that more directly impact their ability to give soldiers and airmen the training and equipment they need to fight. The Air Force wants to restart training flights for units that were grounded due to budget cuts, and the Army wants to restore combat training that has been delayed for some of its troops.

The Army, which is the largest service and has been carrying the bulk of the burden for the war in Afghanistan, also is facing massive bills for the removal of equipment from Afghanistan.

Defense officials said it will cost the military between $5 billion and $7 billion to get the trucks, armored vehicles and other equipment out of the war zone, and either bring it home, transfer it to other allies or destroy it so that technologies won't be compromised.

Because the vast majority of the equipment belongs to the Army, service officials made it clear that those expenses would eat up most of the funding and make it difficult to find any money to cut the number of furlough days for its 330,000 civilians.

According to officials, as much as $5 billion of the reprogrammed money may be allocated to the Army, leaving the other services with less than they had wanted.

The department sent out a brief statement Friday. It says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has determined there is enough extra money, under a bill passed by Congress last month, to keep the towers open through the end of the budget year.

The towers are operated by contractors for the Federal Aviation Administration at low-traffic airports.

They were scheduled to close June 15 as part of the FAA's plan to accommodate automatic spending cuts required by Congress.

An agency spokeswoman, just a week after saying that Farm Service Agency and Rural Department employees wouldn't miss days of work, told Federal News Radio that they now don't expect any furloughs at all.

Hiring freezes and spending cuts were made in several departments instead of the furloughs.

The move comes more than a month after the USDA said it would likely furlough 9,800 food safety inspectors for 11 days each.

READ MORE at federalnewsradio.com.

Starting Wednesday, the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority will allow federal workers to play its courses for $25. That's a discount of about 30 percent off the regular greens fees.

The rate is available from Monday-Thursday after 10 a.m. Workers must show a civilian federal employee ID to be eligible. But they won't have to prove that they've been furloughed or are playing on their furlough day.

The park authority operates three golf courses: Algonkian in Sterling, Brambleton in Ashburn and Pohick Bay in Lorton.

Park authority chairman Brian Knapp says the program is meant as a gesture of solidarity with the thousands of federal workers who will have unpaid days off.

The automatic across-the-boards budget cuts is the biggest culprit. On Wednesday, the Smithsonian begins shutting down several galleries in three buildings through the end of September.

“The White House was one of the things we wanted to do and we weren't able to do it, so it was frustrating with that,” says Chris Crump, a disappointed Michigan tourist.

The National Archives is now operating on shorter than usual spring and summer hours. And while it’s not sequester related, the Washington Monument, wrapped in scaffolding and cordoned off, only adds to the feeling that D.C. is not welcoming.

“It just makes it harder,” says D.C. tour guide Mike Torres. “These people come a long distance to see many things and now we have less time to see it all.”

Officials with Destination D.C. say despite the closures, there are so many other options for tourists that sequestration won’t hurt the number of visitors to our town.

“Just getting back from an international trip, the number one question is how does it impact Washington D.C., and the reality is, only 3 percent of the 18 million annual tourist to Washington, D.C. visit the White House,” says Elliot Ferguson of Destination D.C.

And at the IRS, specifically, it's costing way more per employee to cut days than they're saving.

Federal News Radio reports that at the IRS, the furlough of one employee, while saving $1,800 in salary cost, costs the Treasury Department $61,000. As earlier reported, the IRS plans to furlough each of its 90,000 employees for five days this summer.

The stats come as other agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, have cut their plans for furloughs.

READ MORE at federalnewsradio.com.

In fact, a Federal Times report indicates that federal government hiring has dropped by one-third over the past three years. That's in stark contrast to a period between 2005 and 2009, when hiring peaked at more than 309,000.

However, according to Federal Times, hiring only reached 205,457 in 2012, a 33.51 percent drop from that high. Meanwhile, many top officials say that the market may not have bottomed out.

"I wouldn't be surprised if 2014 is an even tougher year" than 2013," Jeff Neal, a former executive with the Department of Homeland Security, told Federal Times.

Several agencies have announced plans to furlough workers due to budget cuts over the past several weeks. The most dramatic cuts may be at the IRS, where each of the agency's 90,000 workers will be furloughed for five days this summer.

READ MORE at federaltimes.com.

And, we talked with Virginia Senator Mark Warner about the Senate vote to end furloughs for air traffic controllers and how the sequester is impacting other program cuts.

Watch today's show below.

Monday at 10am: Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton

The attorney general says he will be able to avoid furloughs because of additional money in the recently enacted legislation, combined with aggressive steps to freeze hiring and cut contracting and other costs.

Holder said Wednesday in a memo to all employees that even though there will be no furloughs, the $1.6 billion reduction stemming from automatic, across-the-board spending cuts will have negative impacts on the department.

He said that imposing a strict hiring freeze would prevent the Justice Department from filling needed positions. Holder said the department will face additional severe cuts in the budget year that begins Oct. 1 if Congress does not take action.

Airline passengers are starting to feel the impact of the sequester budget cuts, as FAA furloughs are causing delays at the airports. And, the TSA delays it's policy change allowing small knives on planes. We talked with reporter Kris Van Cleave.

And, we talked with fitness expert Josef Brandenburg about a new fitness class at his studio that's helping the Capital Area Food Bank.

Watch today's show below.

Wednesday at 10am: Professor Victor Cha on the latest concerns about North Korea.  

The cuts at the IRS are dramatic. Every employee - nearly 90,000 of them - at the agency will be furloughed for five days. The agency will nearly shut down entirely on May 24, June 14, July 5, July 22 and August 30, Federal News Radio says.

"We wanted to make sure there is only one furlough day a pay period, and we have also worked to stagger the dates further so that there are some pay periods during the summer with no furlough days," IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller said in an email to staff.

READ MORE at federalnewsradio.com.

If the number is reduced, it would be the second time the Pentagon has cut the number of furlough days. It had initially been set at 22 days.

The officials say no decision has been made and that they are not ruling out efforts to drop the furloughs entirely. The renewed talks come as Navy leaders continue to push for eliminating required furloughs for Navy civilians. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Defense officials are reviewing a range of options to determine how many furlough days they can cut, because recent legislation gives the Pentagon more flexibility in how it allocates the required spending cuts for this year. So far, Pentagon leaders have insisted that civilians across all the military services be treated equally, suggesting it would be unfair for workers in one service to face more unpaid days off that those in another service.

Others, including members of Congress, have argued that if there is enough money in an account to pay the civilians, the department should do all it can to allow them to work. The fairness debate has also cut across federal agencies, with some defense workers complaining that employees who do similar jobs for other government departments are not subject to furloughs.

There also has been debate about how many intelligence workers would be furloughed. Intelligence officials are arguing that a certain number of workers are needed in order to adequately monitor and protect the U.S. from national security threats. The U.S. intelligence community is made up of 16 different organizations, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the highly secretive National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. Altogether the agencies have about 100,000 workers.

On Thursday, when asked during a congressional hearing about Army depot furloughs, Pentagon budget chief Robert Hale said he could not yet rule out furloughs for the workers. He acknowledged there is an effort to minimize them.

"Maybe we can get better, maybe we can't," he told the House Armed Services Committee. "We would like to see consistency and fairness, because if we're going to have to jump into this pool, we'd like to jump together. But no final decisions have been made on furloughs."

Defense officials conceded, however, that there has been talk of cutting the number to about seven.

Congressionally mandated automatic budget cuts initially prompted the Defense Department to warn that the bulk of its 800,000 civilians would be forced to take 22 unpaid days off - one in each of the last 22 weeks of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. When lawmakers approved a new spending bill at the end of March they gave the Pentagon greater latitude in where to find the savings.

In an attempt to take some of the sting out of the more than $40 billion in across-the-board budget cuts, Congress shifted additional money to operations and maintenance accounts. Over time, defense officials have continued to study the legislation and figure out where they can cut and where they can add money back to fill shortfalls and fund priorities.

Navy officials have argued that the furloughs - particularly for civilian workers at Navy shipyards and depots - will end up costing the service more than the salary cuts would save.

Navy officials said they believe they can find the $300 million needed to eliminate the furloughs for roughly 200,000 civilians in the Navy and Marine Corps, and that discussions with Pentagon leaders on that proposal continue.

The officials said that according to a Navy analysis, forcing shipyard and depot workers to take 14 days off would extend the amount of time it will take for ship maintenance. They said that would create a ripple effect that will keep vessels at the shipyards longer and create a backlog.

Ultimately, the backlog would delay deployments, forcing other ships to remain at sea longer, increasing their costs.

The White House said Wednesday that four of the 11 divisions under the Executive Office of the President have sent furlough notices to their staff. All of the more than 460 White House Office staffers would be affected.

White House staff is divided into higher ranking officials known as commissioned officers who cannot take leave and thus will get a pay cut. Noncommissioned officers will have to take an unpaid day off. The furloughs range from three to 10 days spread over three to seven months. The furloughs were first reported by Politico.

Other units would stand down on a rotating basis, said Gen. Mike Hostage, commander of Air Combat Command at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia.

"The current situation means we're accepting the risk that combat airpower may not be ready to respond immediately to new contingencies as they occur," Hostage said in a statement.

The Air Force didn't immediately release a list of the specific units and bases that would be affected, but it said it would cover some fighters like F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-22 Raptors, and some airborne warning and control aircraft in the U.S., Europe and the Pacific.

The Air Force says, on average, aircrews "lose currency' to fly combat commissions within 90 to 120 days of not flying. It generally takes 60 to 90 days to train the crews to mission-ready status.

Returning grounded units to be ready for missions will require additional funds beyond Air Combat Command's normal budget, according to Air Force officials. The stand down will remain in effect for the remainder of fiscal year 2013 barring any changes to funding.

"Even a six-month stand down of units will have significant long-term, multi-year impacts on our operational readiness," Air Combat Command spokesman Maj. Brandon Lingle wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

The Defense Department overall faces a $487 billion reduction in projected spending over the next decade and possibly tens of billions more as tea partyers and other fiscal conservatives embrace automatic spending cuts as the best means to reduce the government's trillion-dollar deficit.

On Wednesday, when President Barack Obama submits his fiscal year 2014 budget, the Pentagon blueprint is expected to include requests for two rounds of domestic base closings in 2015 and 2017, a pay raise of only 1 percent for military personnel and a revival of last year's plan to increase health care fees and implement new ones, according to several defense analysts.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said another huge concern is the uncontrollable cost the Defense Department is paying for health care and other benefits. He said money spent on that is not being used on preparing pilots for missions and troops for combat.

The greatest fiscal threat to the military is not declining budgets, Hagel warned, but rather "the growing imbalance in where that money is being spent internally."

For affected units, the Air Force says it will shift its focus to ground training. That includes the use of flight simulators and academic training to maintain basic skills and aircraft knowledge, Lingle said. Aircraft maintainers plan to clear up as much of a backlog of scheduled inspections and maintenance that budgets allow.

On the same day, the U.S. Navy confirmed that the Blue Angels aerobatic team would be cancelling the rest of its season.

Tom Frosch, the Blue Angels lead pilot and team commander, announced the news late Tuesday at the team's Pensacola Naval Air Station headquarters while standing in front of the one of the iconic blue-and-gold jets. Frosch said the news marks the first time since the Korean War that the team would not make the air show rounds.

"The Navy held off as long as possible with the hope of salvaging some of the season," Frosch said. "We hope we'll be turned back on for 2014."

Hagel says escalating spending to maintain benefits, existing military structures and replacements for aging weapons programs are devouring funding needed for critical operations, training and equipment. Hagel is speaking at the National Defense University at Fort McNair.

He says the Pentagon must reevaluate the size of its management and military command structures, which continue to grow even as the overall force numbers decline. And he worries that despite cuts in the past four years, weapons systems are still more expensive and technologically risky than initially promised.

According to the Pentagon, furloughs as a result of sequestration will hit Virginia harder than any other state, followed by California then Maryland. But thanks to additional funding from Congress, the furlough numbers won't be as bad as expected.

Congress warned of dire consequences from sequestration, but in Northern Virginia, many people see a strong economy staying strong.

In the home and heart of the defense industry, the $41 billion in defense cuts this year will no doubt have an impact. But with the slow phase-in of the cuts, with the Pentagon reducing furlough days from 22 to 14, plus a strong stock market, a low local unemployment rate, and a surge in housing, some economists believe Northern Virginia can weather the storm.

M.J. Lee, a financial services reporter for Politico, says it's too soon to determine the full economic impact of sequestration, but continued growth in areas like housing is a good sign.

"There certainly hasn't been this doomsday scenario," says Lee. "The positive news we've seen in that area speaks to the general recovery we've seen in the past few years."

Analysts stress that the true impact of sequestration won't be known for months, and that the ripple effect on defense companies in this region will be noticeable.

But George Mason University economist Stephen Fuller says, "It seems our economy is more resilient than we've given it credit for."