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Obama Urges Congress to Find Compromise on Budget Cuts G.O.P. Drafts Plan to Give Obama Discretion on Cuts
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — With automatic budget cuts set to hit by the end of the week, President Obama on Monday again warned of dire consequences and urged Congress to find a way to compromise in the next four days. WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are preparing to counter increasingly dire warnings from President Obama about the impact of automatic budget cuts with a plan to give the administration more flexibility in instituting $85 billion in cuts, a proposal they say could protect the most vital programs while shifting more of the political fallout to the White House.
“These cuts do not have to happen,” Mr. Obama told a gathering of the nation’s governors at the White House. “Congress can turn them off at any time with just a little bit of compromise.” The plan is vigorously opposed by the administration, which said Monday that it would do little to soften the blow to military and domestic programs. But it is also dividing Democrats, with lawmakers from the states facing the deepest cuts signaling that they may be prepared to go along with Republicans if it means avoiding indiscriminate cuts to military programs and social services.
The president acknowledged that the effects of the $85 billion in automatic cuts — known as sequestration — would not “all be felt” when the cuts become law on Friday morning. But he said that the impact of the cuts would grow over time. With just three days left until the across-the-board cuts called sequestration are scheduled to begin, administration officials continued to describe the consequences in alarming terms, even as there was little evidence of serious negotiations with lawmakers to reach a deal to avoid them.
“The longer these cutbacks are in place, the bigger the impact will be,” he told the governors. He also urged them to talk to lawmakers and “remind them in no uncertain terms exactly what is at stake.” Still, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a leading defense hawk, appeared to advance the debate on Monday. “This is the chance to do the big deal,” he said on CNN. “I’m willing to raise revenue. I’m willing to raise $600 billion in new revenue if my Democratic friends would be willing to reform entitlements, and we can fix sequestration together.”
But the White House and Republicans in Congress have shown no evidence of plans to actually negotiate in an effort to avert the automatic cuts, which are scheduled to take effect on March 1. Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said the automatic cuts would leave the country not as well guarded and less able to meet terrorist threats, and would inconvenience millions of travelers. Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, warned that campgrounds would close, firefighting efforts would be scaled back and fewer seasonal workers would be hired.
Mr. Obama’s administration has spent the last week painting an increasingly bleak picture of life in America after the cuts: jobs lost, government contracts cut, Federal Aviation Administration facilities closed, child care made scarce. Over the weekend, the administration released what it said would be the effects of cuts, state-by-state. “There’s always a threat,” Ms. Napolitano said. “We are going to do everything we can to minimize that risk. But the sequester makes that very, very tough.”
With days until the across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, are set to begin, officials from Mr. Obama’s administration continued to describe the consequences in blunt, dramatic terms, even as there was little evidence of any serious negotiations with lawmakers to reach a deal to avoid them. Seeking to shift responsibility for the cuts to Mr. Obama and to defang attacks by the White House, Republicans were expected to unveil legislation on Tuesday that they said would mitigate some of the biggest concerns. The measure would let agencies and departments cull programs that were long ago proved to be ineffective, and would make sure critical federal functions like air traffic control and meat inspection were spared.
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said that the cuts would leave the country less well guarded and less able to meet terrorist threats, and that they would make life inconvenient for millions of travelers. Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, warned that campgrounds would close, firefighting efforts would be scaled back and fewer seasonal workers would be hired. But White House budget officials are leery. If Congress grants the White House the authority to protect air traffic controllers, Border Patrol agents and national parks, the administration’s carefully devised high-pressure campaign that has been mounting for weeks could deflate. Moreover, the White House would take on the responsibility of deciding which programs to protect and which to expose — and the political consequences that go with that.
“There’s always a threat,” Ms. Napolitano told reporters. “We are going to do everything we can to minimize that risk. But the sequester makes that very, very tough.” Daniel I. Werfel, the controller of the White House budget office, said that if the administration had to cut $2 billion from the Education Department’s budget, choosing between children covered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or Title I for poor districts is not freedom.
That message was questioned by some of the Republican governors in town for the annual meeting of the National Governors Association. After the group meeting with Mr. Obama, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican, accused the president of “campaigning” by overstating the potential impact of the cuts. “Poor children or children with disabilities, it’s $2 billion in a seven-month period of time,” Mr. Werfel said. “The notion that there’s these enormous pockets of low-priority activities that we can move this money from — I don’t see it.”
“The reality is, it can be done,” Mr. Jindal said. “It can be done without jeopardizing the economy. It can be done without jeopardizing critical services.” Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, dismissed the Republican plan, saying that no amount of flexibility could mitigate the damage of the automatic cuts. He said such changes could help only “on the margins.” White House officials fear that the legislation would give lawmakers the false sense that they had voted to take the sting out of cuts that will hurt no matter what flexibility the administration has.
In the meeting, Mr. Obama said the impact could be avoided if Republicans would be willing to embrace some increase in revenue by closing tax loopholes that grant breaks to the wealthy and to corporations. “The notion that you’re walking away from this without some of the abrupt, significant effects that would occur from the sequester — in our estimation, it’s not true,” Mr. Werfel said.
In exchange, Mr. Obama said that Democrats would be willing to accept what he called modest changes in entitlement programs like Medicare. He said that Congress should also agree to new spending on infrastructure and preschool, and that such programs would save money in the long run. The proposal is also opposed by some Republicans who fear that it would give away too much of Congress’s authority to say where and how money gets spent. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, condemned it as an unacceptable ceding of Congressional authority.
“There are always going to be areas where we have some genuine disagreements,” Mr. Obama said. “There are more areas where we can do a lot more cooperating than, I think, we’ve seen over the last several years.” “I say to my Republican friends, if you want to just give the president flexibility as to how to enact these cuts in defense spending, then why don’t we go home and just give him the money?” Mr. McCain said Sunday on CNN. “I am totally opposed to that.”
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, pointed out the irony of Republicans wanting to give Mr. Obama more discretion in how he manages the nation’s finances. “These guys bash the president nonstop,” he said in an interview. “Then they are going to take the power of the purse and say, ‘We are so unable to do our job we are going to give you complete flexibility to do it’? There’s an irony there.”
The showdown is likely to come on Wednesday, when Senate Democrats are to put to a vote legislation that would cancel this year’s automatic, across-the-board cuts and replace them with a $110 billion package of tax increases on incomes over $1 million, the elimination of farm subsidies and military cuts delayed until 2014.
Republicans had been expected to present their own package to replace the so-called sequestration. Instead, Republican leaders were expected to present the flexibility legislation.
Rather than a select set of domestic and military programs facing cuts of 11 percent to 13 percent, a much broader range of federal programs would face a considerably smaller hit. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said that the details were not complete, and that no decision had been made to subject the largest protected parts of the budget — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and military personnel — to cuts.
But if the whole federal budget is exposed, Mr. Stewart said, the dire warnings issued daily by the White House would quickly lose credibility. “If they can’t find 2.4 percent in a $3 trillion budget, we might as well give up,” he said. “It’s not a Hobson’s choice.”
The Republican legislation, however, may be much more constrained than that, simply codifying the latitude Republicans say the administration already has to shift cuts within an agency or department without exposing more programs to the knife.
Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, has joined the effort. “I continue to work with my colleagues in urging the White House and Congressional leaders to at least provide enough flexibility for agencies to make more rational budget decisions,” Mr. Warner said in a statement.
Republicans were also taking steps to show that $85 billion is not hard to find.
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who was drafting the flexibility bill with two fellow Republicans, Senators Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, fired off a letter to the White House budget office pointing to current job openings in the government that could go unfilled: staff assistant at the Labor Department to answer telephones, salary range $51,630 to $81,204; 10 drivers for the State Department, $22.76 to $26.45 an hour; and director for Air Force History and Museum Policies and Programs, up to $165,300 a year.
“Are any of these positions more important than an air traffic controller, a Border Patrol officer, a food inspector, a T.S.A. screener or a civilian supporting our men and women in combat in Afghanistan?” the senators’ letter asked the acting White House budget chief, Jeffrey Zients.