Supercommittee triggers automatic budget cuts. What now?
The automatic cuts triggered by the Congressional supercommittee's failure to come up with a budget plan will be evenly split between defense and non-defense. But some members of Congress are trying to spare the defense budget.
In this file photo, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction meets to hear from Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf about the national debt, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Failure by Congress鈥� debt-cutting supercommittee to recommend $1.2 trillion in savings by Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011, is supposed to automatically trigger spending cuts in the same amount to accomplish that job.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
Now that the supercommittee seems to have gridlocked, we default to the automatic cuts鈥攖he sequester.聽 The fact that these are split evenly between defense and non-defense has some members of Congress* talking about 鈥渞econfiguring鈥� the deal to take less from defense, and implicitly more from non-defense spending (entitlements are largely exempted from the sequester).
This is pure bait and switch.聽 I鈥檓 sorry they don鈥檛 like the deal they cooked up to get out of the debt-ceiling mess they created.聽 I鈥檓 not a big fan聽either.聽 But the trigger was structured as tough on defense to make it something they鈥檇 want to avoid.聽 And let鈥檚 remember: the $900 billion of cuts already on the books came exclusively from the non-defense part of the budget from important programs that are already strained鈥擧ead Start, child care, education, infrastructure, R&D, and more.
As far as the reconfigurers鈥� tag-line鈥斺�渁 threat to national security鈥濃�攚ell, I don鈥檛 buy it and they should have thought of that before.聽 Defense spending is up to around $550 billion per year, and security, adding in Homeland Security et al, gets you up to close to $900 billion.聽 So $55 billion of cuts per year for nine years is a worthy goal, especially in a world where a flexible, efficient military is much more important than a huge one.
But I鈥檓 no expert and if I鈥檓 wrong鈥攊f defense cuts of that magnitude are too large鈥攖hen they should be diminished dollar-for-dollar with the cuts on the non-defense side.聽 Yes, that means less than $1.2 trillion in deficit savings but so be it.聽 It鈥檚 an arbitrary target anyway, set because that was the increase in the debt ceiling, which itself is a useless construct.聽 The concentric circles of crazy here are truly daunting.
*And the defense secretary, Leon Panetta, whom the White House needs to bring back on the reservation鈥搎uickly.
Or, perhaps you鈥檇 like to have this all summarized by a Haiku:
To reconfigure
Is to jigger the trigger
Than that, we鈥檙e bigger