With the stroke of a pen, President Obama set in motion on Friday night $85 billion in automatic, across the board budget cuts in this year's budget, cuts that the President himself labeled "dumb" at an impromptu news conference in the White House Briefing Room.
"And let’s be clear. None of this is necessary," the President said, repeatedly pointing the finger of blame at Republicans in the Congress, who were more than ready to point right back and blame him for coming up with the idea.
As for the details of the sequester, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued an 83 page report that runs down - line by line - how much money will be chopped from every department and agency big and small; some you know very well, others you have never heard of before.
Some examples:
+ The Centers for Disease Control would lose $289 million
+ $175 million would be cut out of Low Income Home Energy Assistance Programs
+ The Office of the Chief Information Officer in the Department of Homeland Security would lose $16 million
+ FEMA would see $928 million in disaster relief sequestered
+ $2 million is cut from the Rural Electrification and Telecommunications Loans Program Account
+ $74 million cut from Food for Peace Title II grants
+ NOAA loses $1 million for the Limited Access System Administration Fund
+ Tennessee Valley Authority to have $23 million sequestered
+ $20 million from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund
+ $14 million from the National Labor Relations Board
+ National Endowment for the Arts has $7 million chopped, same for National Endowment for the Humanities
I could go on and on and on and on, but I won't.
You can read the full report on the White House web site.
Something else that struck me as I went through the report was how much money is sitting on the shelf - unspent - at the Pentagon.
I'm sure officials at the Defense Department would have an array of reasons as to why that money is there, and what it would be needed for in the future.
But there were over 80 different examples of "unobligated" balances - as in money given to the Pentagon in prior budget years that had not been spent.
Not only did the Pentagon lose money in certain accounts this year, but they also lost money in the same accounts that was left over from earlier budgets.
For example, the $970 million in unobligated money for "Foreign Currency Fluctuations" and the $290 million in the "Acquisition Workforce Development Fund" was sequestered.
I counted up over $4.6 billion in sequestered funds just from unspent balances at the Pentagon - that was just over 10% of the entire sequester for the Defense Department.
That's the quick read. We'll get into more detail in coming days.
About Jamie Dupree
Jamie Dupree is the Radio News Director of the Washington Bureau of the Cox Media Group and writes the Washington Insider blog.
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