The likely next director of the White House budget office faced few questions about “sequestration” during her confirmation hearing Monday, perhaps signaling the debate over those budget cuts has died down in Congress.
Sylvia Burwell, whom President Barack Obama nominated to direct the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), did not even cite or field questions about the $1 trillion-plus in decade-long spending reductions for much of her hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The fiscal year 2014 budget Obama submitted to Congress on April 10 does not account for sequestration, which started March 1. His plan calls for replacing the $500 billion in decade-long Pentagon sequestration cuts with $150 billion in other defense reductions. However, the president’s spending proposal does away with sequestration through a path many Republicans reject because it includes provisions such as tax increases.
Since sequestration started in March, the previously loud and clamorous debate in Congress over stopping the cuts–through vastly different deficit-cutting plans offered by Republicans and Democrats–has been noticeably muted.
During Burwell’s confirmation hearing yesterday, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) made a pitch for a “more-balanced approach” to deficit reduction that does not just focus on savings–as House Republicans have proposed–but also includes additional revenues. Levin chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and, like many pro-military lawmakers, has warned that sequestration will harm the military.
Burwell told Levin it is her “belief that in an effort to get to the levels of deficit reduction that I believe we need over the long term, that we need to have a combination of spending reductions as well as revenue to get to the number that we think we are trying to do.”
“Because I think the most important thing is that we continue on that path of reduction of the debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio,” she said.