"INCOMING" - Here comes Sequester: Part 2.

"INCOMING" - Here comes Sequester: Part 2.(TheHill).By Erik Wasson.

An unwelcome sequel is scheduled for January release and it’s titled Sequester: Part 2.

It is increasingly likely that this second round of indiscriminate cuts will reprise the first sequester, with concomitant public frustration about Washington’s inability to budget rationally.

The first sequester, triggered by the 2011 Budget Control Act, required agencies to cut $80 billion equally from across their operations.

Lawmakers in both parties said they wanted to avoid using this blunt fiscal ax and criticized it for cutting the good with the bad. Agency heads decried worker furloughs and warned of economic pain.
The second year of the 2011 Budget Control Act was supposed to be easier.
From 2014 on, the act imposed spending ceilings on the government that were meant to force appropriators to make considered decisions on spending cuts instead of across-the-board slashing.
But it appears likely that Congress will fail to agree to specific cuts, and will punt the decisions to agencies.
The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday adopted top-line figures for each of the 12 appropriations bills. These are so different from the Senate’s likely bills that it will be all but impossible to reconcile them, lawmakers say.
“It is too early in the year to condemn us to an inevitable CR [continuing resolution] — it’s progressing in that direction. That’s the message we have been putting out loud and clear,” Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said Tuesday, adding, “We don’t want a long-term CR. We are boxed in, which I don’t like.”
Unless President Obama and congressional leaders reach a deficit grand bargain, experts say Congress is on track to put most spending on autopilot with another continuing resolution.
The government is operating under a continuing resolution set at $1.043 trillion, but the Budget Control Act would set the fiscal 2014 spending level at $967 billion. That would require a cut of about $76 billion across the government.
That cut would need to be made 15 days after Congress adjourns at the end of the year. Implementing it without furloughs or layoffs could be very tough for agency heads, who have already struggled to find one-time savings this year, aides said.
Rogers called the sequester situation “idiotic” but said his hands are “tied” by the Budget Control Act, the House-passed budget and House rules.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who heads the Senate Appropriations Labor subcommittee, argued the cuts would be devastating.

“Do they intend to eliminate the entire National Institutes of Health? That wouldn’t be enough to achieve their proposed cut,” he said. “Do they plan to eliminate all funding for special education, Title I, after-school centers, and teacher quality? Again, that wouldn’t be enough to achieve their proposed cut.”

Rogers said producing some of bills, such as the noncontroversial Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs spending measures, is better than producing none.
Ranking member Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.)  pointed to confusion among Democrats on how to handle the train wreck.
“We don’t know what the president is thinking, we don’t know what [the Office of Management and Budget] is thinking,” she said.Hmmmm.....Obama: "All the Choices We've Made Have Been the Right Ones".  Read the full story here.