Anyone with experience listening to the claims of those who oppose responsible government budgeting will not be surprised after reading this Bloomberg Businessweek report:

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in April that 12,000 employees would have to take four days off without pay this year, Republican Representative Frank Wolf made sure that wasn’t going to happen. The agency that runs the National Weather Service needed to shave $17.5 million from its budget to comply with the across-the-board federal spending cuts known as sequestration. Wolf, whose Virginia district is home to many federal workers, thought it was crazy to sideline storm-tracking meteorologists at the start of what looked to be a devastating tornado season. “Your people are your most valuable resource,” he says. “I told them, ‘Find the money. And if you can’t find the money, I’ll tell you where to find it.’?”

They found the money. Just before midnight on June 7—a week after tornadoes ravaged Oklahoma—NOAA chief Kathryn Sullivan e-mailed employees to say there’d be no furloughs. The agency told Congress it would pay employees by delaying construction of weather-monitoring ships and taking funds from programs to improve hurricane forecasting.

NOAA is one of more than a dozen federal agencies that have used creative accounting to keep workers on the job despite steep budget cuts. Early this year, as the sequester was about to take effect, the heads of 19 federal departments warned Congress that furloughs would mean a shortage of food inspectors, park rangers, public defenders, and prison guards. All of those workers have been spared, and the wave of short-term staff reductions that threatened to cripple Washington didn’t come. Only seven agencies—including the Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Labor—are still requiring workers to take unpaid days off, and most of those departments have managed to come up with enough money to greatly reduce the number of temporary layoffs.

Overblown claims about tens of thousands of government workers losing their jobs? That sounds familiar.