The White House missed a deadline for sending Congress a report on so-called sequestration budget cuts last week, but said it will deliver the document in the coming days.
Republicans reacted angrily to the news of the delay, going as far as to charge President Barack Obama may support the sequestration cuts that he has denounced and called for Congress to prevent.
The report under the spotlight is required by the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, which Obama signed into law Aug. 7. The act, crafted by House Republicans, says the report should be sent to Congress in 30 days. The deadline, depending on whom you ask, was either last Thursday or last Friday.
Yet White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters on Air Force One at the end of last week that the White House would submit the report to Congress this week, according to a transcript.
“Given the time needed to address the complex issues involved in preparing the report, the administration will be submitting that report to Congress late next week,” Carney said last Friday.
The transparency law calls for Obama to explain how specific spending accounts would be slashed if the sequestration cuts are not stopped. Sequestration comes as a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which says if a panel failed to craft a deficit-cutting plan last year, as it did, then $1.2 trillion in longterm sequestration cuts would start in January 2013. They would reduce the Pentagon’s planned spending by $500 billion over a decade. While the cuts are designed to be across-the-board–and trim same percentage from every defense program, project, and activity–some aspects of the Pentagon budget are exempt.
Obama opposes sequestration and has called for Congress to agree on an alternate deficit-cutting plan, one that includes cuts Democrats don’t like and revenues Republicans have resisted. Yet the president has pledged to veto legislation that simply tinkers with sequestration without offering a broad alternative.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.)–a supporter of proposals to shield the Pentagon from at least the first year of sequestration cuts–said Obama’s “continued silence on sequestration is disappointing.”
“I can only conclude that President Obama wants to impose cuts his own Secretary of Defense has called catastrophic,” McKeon said in a statement last Friday. “His administration proposed the sequester trigger in the first place and he is on record subordinating this crisis to his own political prospects. What other reason could he have for delaying a report that makes the consequences of sequestration as clear as possible.”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) argued in a statement that Obama “refuses to level with the American people about the devastating impact (sequestration) will have on our country.”
Boehner noted the Republican-led House has passed legislation to offset the first year of decade-long sequestration cuts by cutting funding for politically sensitive budget items including food stamps.
Pentagon acquisition czar Frank Kendall warned a defense-industry crowd last Tuesday that in reality not much planning can be done for the sequestration cuts. He estimates they would indiscriminately slice 11 percent off of parts of the Pentagon budget except for exempt areas such as military personnel.
“The way sequestration works is (that under it) planning is kind of irrelevant,” Kendall told the ComDef 2012 conference at the National Press Club. “You don’t have much choice. There’s no flexibility in the law….We haven’t done a detailed plan…in part because there’s not all that much planning to be done.”
He said if the sequestration cuts kick in, officials would look at 2,500 lines in the defense budget and “go cut each of them the same,” by roughly 11 percent.