Long-awaited WH report spells out deep sequestration cuts

Long-awaited WH report spells out deep sequestration cuts
By LEO SHANE III
Stars and Stripes
Published: September 14, 2012

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.
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