On this upcoming sequester, exactly what funds are we talking about?

No one really knows, since this is a new and untested phenomenon. It’s a stupid idea, but that is the best Congress can do,

The theory of the sequester is that it is an across-the-board reduction in funding. So theoretically, every budget everywhere is cut by 2% (or whatever it is).

But in fact, the cuts are on a departmental level, and there is some discretion in each department over what is to be chopped and what not. For example, the Border Patrol still needs to guard the border, so Homeland Security might cut the number of people frisking you at airports.

But it’s a huge mystery.

“As it stands now, the modified sequestration will cut discretionary defense spending by 7.3 percent and discretionary non-defense spending by 5.1 percent this year, along with a 2 percent cut to Medicare. The non-defense cuts will land on housing assistance and community development programs, education grants to states and many federal agencies. Some initiatives are exempt, including Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps and children’s health insurance.”

The Huffington Post

Did you see this story, @rojo? Very disturbing.

The way the sequestration bill was written, the cuts are to be across the board. They MUST apply to everything each agency does. Agency heads have no discretion under the law to push the cuts here or there in order to do the least harm. The bill was deliberately crafted to be unthinkable, and yet to those who truly believe that the US would be far better off with no government outside of the Defense Department, it’s just a starting point. They will follow Lord Norquist’s wish, “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”

Somehow, these Libertarians look at failed states like Somalia and think, “Now there’s paradise.”

“It was the White House. It was Obama and Jack Lew and Rob Nabors who went to the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and said, ’[the sequester] is the solution.’”
-Bob Woodward

This whole argument is a ‘Bait and switch’ tactic. The sequester amounts to a 2.4% cut and the President has some fairly broad discretion on how it will be allocated. Here is a fairly technical breakdown on how it works. Anyone that has ever done any budgeting will know that a small cut in the projected budget is not really very difficult.

The real problem here, the one Obama hopes to avoid, is the next Ongoing Resolution. Since the Senate refuses to pass a budget, we really have no baseline to see what is happening. That’s not an accident, the Democrats don’t want us to have any visibility into what is happening financially. We passed an ongoing resolution just before the last election that will take us through March. If sequester happens, the next ongoing resolution will be from a smaller base and Obama doesn’t want that. So he is pushing to delay the sequestration until after the next Ongoing Resolution. It’s all a game and if the Senate would take up a real budget, we could resolve all this. But they won’t so we continue to argue with vague promises of doom and gloom. No Chicken Little, the sky is not falling.

Guys, regardless of who is at fault, what is being cut?
Will the DOD (for example) physically have less money than last year? Will it be the same as last year because what was being cut is a proposed higher budget? Or will it be more because the cuts will not totally eliminate a higher budget they requested?

See if this answers your questions, @rojo.

The Budget Control Act (BCA) requires a cut of over $1 trillion in spending through a sequester. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is given authority to carry out the sequester. We do not yet know OMB’s interpretation of the Act, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assumes that the sequester is intended to make cuts to discretionary appropriations and mandatory spending that add up to $1.2 trillion (less assumed debt service savings) over nine years, beginning in 2013.
• For fiscal years 2014—­‐2021, cuts would be achieved by lowering the original BCA caps on defense (which does not include Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)) and non-­‐defense discretionary budget authority, and by cancelling budgetary resources for some mandatory spending programs.
o 2013 is dealt with differently. There are no new discretionary caps. Rather, the cuts will be made regardless of Congress’ appropriation levels. (Note: Our interpretation is that this cut will include OCO.) Unless resolved by September, agencies will have to begin their fiscal years with a high level of uncertainty about their funding levels.

• Real level of program cuts is $984 billion. This is because $216 billion of the $1.2 trillion will come from assumed interest savings.
• Cuts are evenly divided between each of the nine sequester years. Therefore, each year, OMB must sequester $109 billion from projected spending.
• Annual cuts are split evenly between the non-­‐exempt portions of defense (function 050) and non-­‐defense spending – an approximate cut of $55 billion to each. Cuts are spread among discretionary and non-­‐exempt mandatory spending. Defense and non-­‐defense discretionary spending will be cut to lowest levels as a percentage of the economy in the modern era.

• Most mandatory spending is exempt from the sequester, including: Social Security, retirement programs, veteran’s benefits, refundable tax credits, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), unemployment insurance, food stamps (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and a host of other programs (mostly those benefitting individuals with low incomes).
• Medicare is subject to the sequester in the form of provider payment cuts, but those cuts cannot exceed 2 percent.

Thanks @bkcunningham I am looking at it now.

Also, here is another decent piece on what it means.

@rojo

According to the National Review “If the sequester goes into effect, the federal budget for this year will still be larger than last year’s ($3.553 trillion in 2013 vs. $3.538 trillion in 2012).” Remember that these cuts are to projected spending and increases annually. With or without sequester, spending never declines. It only increases slightly less.

It certainly looks like we’re going to just have to play the game out and see if the sky falls. It is predictable that the next big budget fight, whether to renege on our debt or not, will be used by Tea Party Republicans as one more opportunity to chip away at the parts of government they hate, anything that helps ordinary people.