It's been less than 24 hours since the General Assembly "balanced" the state budget by approving over $7 billion in borrowing, delayed bill payments, and draconian cuts.  Lawmakers ultimately left Springfield pledging that third party social service providers will receive, on average, 85 percent of the state funding that flowed their way in FY 2009.

But will they?

Providers from across the state -- who've already shed jobs and cut programs serving thousands of vulnerable citizens -- consider the budget a ticking time bomb and are less than confident they will see only a 15 percent reduction. The Heartland Alliance's Doug Schenkelberg tells us that, until Gov. Pat Quinn decides how to divvy up $2.2 billion in new "revenue" to cover human services, no one knows how painful the cuts will be.

Today, officials in the departments that dole out grants to these service providers - Human Services, Children and Family Services, Aging, etc. -- are back at the drawing board figuring out how to stretch the available funds across multiple agencies. And you can be sure they're looking closely at the associated federal matching dollars before pulling out their red pens.

Already, organizations are facing the consequences, as Nadeen Israel explains today in a blog post highlighting the "domino effect":

[T]hose at the front lines here at Heartland Alliance are trying to figure out how to prepare for the impending overflow of clients that are already beginning to pour in.

I spoke with one of our staff members in our Violence Recovery Services (VRS) Program (provides comprehensive services to victims of domestic violence and sexual violence) yesterday about the domino effect they're experiencing from the state budget cuts. She shared how worried she and the rest of the program staff is about how they are going to handle the increase in client referrals they are already receiving from other Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault programs that have been forced to drastically cut services or completely shut-down.

She also added that VRS has been operating with a waiting list for quite some time now and that she anticipates that list to grow substantially in the coming weeks and months.

Of course, the worst is probably yet to come. "There's a much longer list of agencies that didn't cut and kept their fingers crossed," Schenkelberg  warns. "Now I think we're going to see them make the tough decisions."  In tracking the fallout that followed the start of the fiscal year on July 1, we came across many such agencies that hadn't yet pulled the trigger on layoffs or program cuts.  We'll be following back up with them in the coming weeks.