Posted on 09/14/2012 11:02:44 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar
WASHINGTON — The White House for the first time offered a detailed look at billions in automatic budget cuts scheduled for January, warning in a report released Friday that alternatives must be found to prevent the crippling of thousands of military and nondefense programs.
For the Defense Department, the scenario would mean roughly a 10 percent cut in military spending, except for personnel accounts. The report doesn't detail exactly what those lost dollars would mean in terms of lost programs or purchases, but does give a top-line view of the size of the cuts.
Defense Health programs would lose about $3.3 billion in funding. Army purchases of combat vehicles, weapons and ammunition would be trimmed by $505 million. The Navy would lose almost $4.4 billion in ship and aircraft procurement money.
The four services’ operations and maintenance accounts would be reduced by more than $18 billion combined.
The automatic cuts, also known as sequestration, were enacted by Congress last summer as part of a larger deficit-reduction plan.
In total, the spending curbs would take away $54.6 billion in planned military spending, the first installment on a 10-year deficit-reduction plan to reduce defense funds by about $500 billion.
The White House called it a potential disaster.
“The administration does not support the indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts in this report,” one senior administration official said. “We believe they should never be implemented.”
When Congress adopted the Budget Control Act, it included the sequestration cuts — more than $1 trillion in budget trims over the next decade, spread evenly between defense and nondefense accounts — as a poison pill designed to force a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel to find alternatives.
But that attempt to force compromise failed. For the last nine months, lawmakers and Pentagon leaders have decried the looming defense cuts as dangerous and nonsensical, but Congress has not been able to agree on an alternative.
The 394-page report released Friday lists hundreds of exempt spending accounts across the government — including all of the Department of Veterans Affairs — but White House officials have insisted that the law limits how much they can mitigate the effects of the automatic budget reductions.
“Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument,” the report says. “It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction.”
House Armed Services Committee officials criticized the report as lacking any real detail, failing to explain how individual programs and offices will be impacted.
They said the White House is dodging its responsibility to inform the public about how harmful the automatic cuts will be, and has failed to direct the Defense Department to properly prepare for a worst-case scenario.
On Thursday, House Republicans passed legislation calling for the president to replace the automatic defense cuts with nonmilitary trims. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif., noted it was the fifth measure passed by the chamber this year aimed at preventing “devastating” cuts to national security programs.
“It is my sincere hope that this most recent action by the House will compel the President to finally do his part to end the sequestration crisis and bring his party in the Senate to a conference committee,” he said in a statement.
Like the previous House GOP proposals to avert sequestration, the measure is unlikely to gain traction in the Democratically controlled Senate. Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats have rejected proposals that would shift all of the automatic cuts onto domestic programs to save military accounts.
Meanwhile, defense contractors have begun warning employees that deep cuts to military funds in the middle of the fiscal year could jeopardize tens of thousands of jobs.
The Congressional Budget Office has warned that sequestration could result in massive layoffs among Defense Department civilian employees and lead to a new recession.
The exemption for military personnel accounts means that military paychecks won’t be affected by sequestration. Officials said that the Department of Defense would also be able to shift funds to ensure that operations in Afghanistan and “critical military readiness capabilities” will not be hurt.
But the report states that “sequestration would result in a reduction in readiness of many non-deployed units, delays in investments in new equipment and facilities, cutbacks in equipment repairs, declines in military research and development efforts, and reductions in base services for military families.”
Beyond the military, the report says sequestration would lead to a 2 percent reduction in funding for Medicaid and other domestic health programs, and an 8 percent cut in nonexempt, nondefense programs.
White House officials also noted the report offers only preliminary estimates, since operating budgets for every department have not been finalized by Congress.
Congress isn’t expected to act on any of those budgets — or alternatives to sequestration — until after the November elections.
Defense contractors are already laying off employees and have been doing so for some time. That is not necessarily a bad thing.
I know these budget numbers are off slightly, but...
The annual budget was roughly $660B in FY2012 ($55B/mo). FY2013 already has roughly $110B cuts built in, thanks to Panetta. For the first 3 months of FY2013, the spending will continue at $550B rate, so $135B will be spent by Jan. So there would be $415B left, but they must cut $55B, so $360B remains over 9 mos ($40B/mo).
FY2012 = $55B/mo
Jan 2013 = $40B/mo
If this math is correct, DoD/Intel is facing a 30% cut. No change in mission, according to BO yesterday. Also, cuts of this magnitude inherently distract from the missions, as organizations take time to adjust to the losses.
We’re all in favor of DoD/Intel taking its share of cuts, but the mission and the foreign policy must change in a rational way.
These are very dangerous. Enemies will do this math too.
Let me put it this way:
About seven years ago, my husband and I were broke. We weren’t even making it paycheck to paycheck. We were having to use credit cards to close the gap at the end of the month. Every month, we dug ourselves deeper.
We started Dave Ramsey. Now, on average, we were underwater by about 15%, so we had to slash our spending by that much.
Now imagine if I just said “we’re cutting 15% off of every expense.”
So we’re dropping groceries, fast food, the mortgage payment, our phone payments, our clothing budget by 15% each.
Well, that would be stupid. There are things that we could’ve cut by 100% (fast food) without any real issues. Clothes by 75%. Groceries by maybe 30%.
But if we only paid 85% of our mortgage, internet and phone bills - we’d have been out of a house. Those particular things had to remain fully funded.
It took me a full 6 months to find ALL of the ‘holes in our bucket’ and stop the leaks. (By then I was working on home-made cleaning products. Saving $3-5 here an there was worth it to me.)
Sequestration is exactly this scenario. Just slash 11% across the board with no rhyme or reason. No thought. It’s jaw-droppingly irresponsible.
IMHO, we could cut 25% of the military budget without compromising national security - with thoughtfulness and care.
It will hurt like nothing we have ever seen. Unfortunately decades of compromise and inaction will require such hurt. I know it will effect my employment too. Like it or not, healthcare is a government job these days. If they allow this to happen, we can then get serious about fixing this. Forty seven percent of our legal population is on the dole, another large percent work for the government. Elections simply do nothing with these numbers in place. Any attempt to restore freedom and democracy is met by wars on women and elderly rhetoric. Unfortunately for us, this rhetoric is believable when the money keeps rolling in.
Yep, you got it right. The military is part of Big Government. We can get more bang for our buck on a well-trimmed military budget. They’re is a lot of waste. Cut the officer corp and get rid of all our excess general staff.
Defense spending has been declining while domestic and entitlement spending is going up. Even with sequestration, the entitlemnt spending is actually MORE than it is now, while the defense spending again will be cut. I’m for rooting out the excesses in ALL, not just the selected few.
Not to mention California, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Washington state (think Boeing). And that doesn’t even account for the impact on the supply chain and smaller distributors in many other states. I’ll be looking for my notice on November 1st. I’m a little older and am prepared if it happens but many of my coworkers are not. What ticks me off the most is hearing yesterday that domestic program spending+entitlements actually goes UP, even with sequestration. We need the adults back in charge, pronto.
Agree that the Fed gov is seriously over staffed. While I would disagree with you on the Departments to be closed, feeling many of them were created for a reason that still exists, they still need to be downsized as mission creep has created many agencies that duplicate the activities best done in other Departments. Defense is over staffed somewhat, but many of the civilian agencies have much more excess staffing. I would take the equivalent in all agencies of how many Captains per PFC, and fire all administrators in excess of that number.
It seems everyone in a profession with Federal oversight has stories of how the agencies that oversees their profession could be streamlined, removed or otherwise improved.
All I’ve got to say is, welcome to reality, five years later than the private sector.
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Tuble, can you believe these people? Here on Freeper.
My goodness, if were not for government employment think of all the people out of work and the devastation on the economy! Brilliant! So the solution to 8% unemployment is for the government to hire 5 million new people and watch the economy boom!
Titan/L3 is making large cuts now. It is affecting many of my friends and others in my area.
How about “everbody does their fair share”; 10 % cuts in welfare, unemployment, foodstamps, etc.?
When has the Defense budget ever hit one trillion dollars?
No, I’m not going to let the country collapse just so we can blame Obama for it. I have more confidence than you that the GOP will win the Senate and, with control of the House, Senate and White House, and with Paul Ryan’s leadership, the GOP may yet grow the backbone to do what’s right. It’s our only hope.
The problem with your analysis is that you concede the collapse is already inevitable and want to affix the blame. I think with a strong national will, it can be saved and if Republicans control all three houses, there’s a chance it can happen.
Regardless of who is in control, America won’t be worth saving if it is allowed to collapse. You might as well just move to another country now.
“There aren’t enough jobs to absorb this big of a layoff”
There haven’t been enough jobs to absorb private sector layoffs over the last four or five years. Why are defense bureaucrats different? The only way I see to provide enough jobs to recover the economy of just a few years ago is to cut government’s bite, which if I had it my way would be to cut entitlements first. But if defense can’t lose 50 billion we might as well give up now.
I ‘m not confident collapse can be avoided by the best of Republicans. But I know for an absolute fact they won’t if we let the defense card be a trump for Democrats.
I think you have a valid point on that but this is the way that BOTH parties chose to cut spending, not the rational way.
At the time the BCA was passed last year Ryan praised it, and I mean really praised it on TV so we would think it was great. There was no talk by him of those reservations. He told the American people it was a ‘Historical Moment’ on his house floor speech.
Now after him helping putting a gun to the puppy's head with a timer he says “Obama put the gun to his head and is going the pull the trigger so vote for us so we can stop it”
Actually he says Obama is GOING to make those cuts that were already passed in a bill he supported and voted for. And anyone can see it, it;s on youtube. It's just too obvious,
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