White House details ‘destructive’ spending cuts

by Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times

With excruciating detail, the White House’s budget office on Friday laid out exactly where it will have to cut $109 billion from federal spending in January, including $11.1 billion from Medicare and $54.7 billion from defense spending.

The defense cuts include $21.5 billion from operations and maintenance for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and the reserves and National Guard, and nearly $1.4 billion from military aid to Afghanistan, with tens of billions coming from procurement and other Pentagon accounts.

“The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments, and core government functions,” the White House’s budget office said in the report.

Everything from fencing and technology along the U.S.-Mexico border to the government’s own internal watchdogs to local environmental programs are also on the chopping block.

The cuts fall particularly heavy on the federal civilian workforce, where staffing levels and salaries would be docked more than 8 percent almost across the board….

Administration officials said the numbers are preliminary, and will be updated based on 2013 spending levels that Congress is working on this month.

While military personnel were specifically exempted, other parts of the Pentagon were not, and will see a nearly 10 percent cut. The Army is slated to lose nearly $7 billion in operations and maintenance funding, and the Navy and Air Force will lose another $4.3 billion each in operations money.

Border fencing and technology would take a $33 million hit, and salaries and staffing for the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement would also be cut.

And at a time when embassy security is under question following the recent attacks, that account would be cut by $129 million….

The Medicare cuts are not supposed to touch beneficiaries, but rather come out of providers’ pockets instead.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as President Obama, all agreed to last year’s debt deal, though all of them say they didn’t intend for the automatic cuts to actually happen.

Now, they are pointing fingers at each other….

read … White House details ‘destructive’ spending cuts 

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