Sequester what will be cut

State programs that rely on federal money will have to begin accounting for lesser funds as soon as President Obama orders the sequester into effect on Friday. Government contractors, meanwhile, will feel the cuts immediately. President Obama and congressional Republicans have each proposed their own ideas to avert the sequester, but the two sides haven't agreed yet.

At this point, the sequester is all but assured to go into effect. Obama will meet with congressional leaders Friday morning, but negotiations haven't exactly been substantive thus far.

Given the sequester's all-around unpalatability, the likeliest scenario appears to be a short-term fix after the sequester kicks in for a few weeks. President Obama and his GOP counterparts, distant as they are on matters of fiscal policy, have a few remaining options to keep the sequester from wreaking its oft-alleged, oft-doubted chaos:. Given how little sides have been talking over the last few weeks, it's almost completely impossible that such a grand deal will get struck before p.

So why not give federal agencies broader authority to rearrange their money and shrink overall spending while maintaining the most vital programs and services? Republicans have reportedly fought over this, and President Obama has resisted the idea of leaving the sequester in place, even with more leeway to make the cuts less painful.

Giving agencies more flexibility poses two problems. First, it fundamentally changes the sequester by making it more palatable. When Congress and Obama agreed on it in , the sequester was designed as a punishment for failing to reach a broadly acceptable deficit deal. If the cuts aren't so bad, the intent of forcing a deal will be abandoned.

Second, it cedes power to the Obama administration, which members of Congress don't like. As Sen. John McCain put it in a recent interview, Senate appropriators spent many hours juggling the funds for Defense programs—why simply let Obama undo their work? When Obama and Congress passed their fiscal-cliff deal in January, they delayed the sequester by finding two months' worth of deficit reduction to match the sequester's spending levels and decided to prevent the sequester from kicking in until March 1.

That's not how it's supposed to work. The rest of it was through raising taxes — tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. And by the way, the whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing taxloopholes and so forth.

That was the whole point of this so-called sequestration. They haven't come together and done their jobs, and so as a consequence, we've got these automatic, brutal spending cuts that are poised to happen next Friday.

But Congress has to act in order for that to happen. Learn more about President Obama's plan to avoid harmful cuts and reduce the deficit. And most Americans agree with me. Watch President Obama's full statement on YouTube. The state-by-state reports below show the impact the sequester will have on jobs and middle class families across the country.

You are here Home Blog. Twitter Facebook Email. Have questions about what the sequester is, and why American families and our national economy face the threat of harmful budget cuts?

What Happens to Discretionary Spend i ng After ? Current law calls for the sequester caps to continue through After , discretionary spending is not subject to any cap. The cost of repealing the sequester depends on how much of the sequester cuts policymakers wish to reverse and for how many years. Any reduction in the sequester should at minimum fully replace these temporary savings with more targeted and permanent deficit reduction. And even that impact assumes that lawmakers will continue funding discretionary programs after based on the low sequester levels.