Instead of blame, how about the GOP getting credit for the savings. With a budget of around 700 billion, a 50 billion dollar cut is not going to cause the place to close down. Of course, to exert pressure, they will initially threaten to lay off everyone, scrap aircraft carriers, ground air wings, and disband army divisions. Only as a last resort will they actually look at cutting a small amount of non essential spending. That is the bureaucratic way.
One would think that a $50B cut in a $700B budget could be done in a way that doesn’t cause massive turmoil by cutting non-essential spending. But, this sequestration doesn’t work that way. The law says all elements of the budget take the same hit. Even if you could identify the non-essential spending, you can take the cut only in those elements.
The other problem is that this 10% cut equates to a 20% cut. The whole cut isn’t spread out across the whole year. It only affects the last six months.
Suppose you’re an agency with a 100 employees. You could have cut 10 at the beginning of the year, but the administration wouldn’t allow that because those cuts would have been a month before the election. Now the same agency has to cut 20 people...
Even though one could argue that federal employees are overpaid and underworked, this still means the GOP will have to justify a lot of lost jobs.