WASHINGTON - US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will take a voluntary pay cut as a show of solidarity with Pentagon employees who will have to take unpaid time off over the coming months, a Defense Department spokesman said on Tuesday.Hagel will give back the equivalent of 14 days' pay to the government, Pentagon spokesman George Little said. That would come to about $10,750, based on Hagel's salary of $199,700."My understanding is that there is a legal way to actually write a check, if you will, back to the US Treasury," Little told reporters.Most of the Pentagon's 800,000 civilian employees will have to take 14 days of unpaid leave as it implements more than $40 billion in spending cuts before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 as part of a blunt budget-cutting effort known as "the sequester" that will affect a broad range of government operations.Republicans and Democrats set up the sequester in 2011 as a worst-case scenario that would force them to find other ways to narrow trillion-dollar budget deficits, but they have been unable to do so.
(photo credit: The Jerusalem Post)