[h=3]By PETER NICHOLAS And DAMIAN PALETTA[/h]With across-the-board federal spending cuts likely to begin Friday, a growing question is how much discretion the Obama administration has to soften their blow.
Constrained by laws governing the way it spends money approved by Congress, the White House said there is little it can do to spare Americans what it said would be a range of hardships unless Congress finds a way to delay or cancel the $85 billion of cuts, known as the sequester, due to take effect through September.
That argument helps the White House try to put pressure on congressional Republicans to negotiate a substitute deficit-reduction plan. But administration officials say it is true, nonetheless.
On air travel, for example, the administration said it likely wouldn't be able to prevent long delays while also ensuring public safety. Roughly all of the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic controllers would be subject to mandatory unpaid leave, the agency said. In addition, agents for the Transportation Security Administration and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection would face cutbacks and furlough, Janet Napolitano, head of the Department of Homeland Security, said Monday.
But some Republicans remain unconvinced. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) tweeted on Monday: "Airport delays are preventable: Currently billions of waste & unspent funds at DHS."
The answer to how much the administration can control what exactly is cut may not be known until the deadline hits and agency heads begin making adjustments to live within the tighter budgets.
For now, neither political party sees a way to avert the sequester. No serious negotiations are under way, and on Tuesday President Barack Obama heads to a shipyard in southern Virginia to highlight the potential economic toll.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said Monday that he hopes the week doesn't pass without negotiations. The president and congressional leadership should meet "around a table, eyeball to eyeball," Mr. Kaine said.
One White House official said Monday that the sequester, which grew out of the summer 2011 deal to raise the nation's borrowing limit, was "designed not to be flexible." It was written to ensure that the cuts are leveled at every "program, project, and activity" within each individual budget account, the White House said.
But a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, suggested the dire portrait presented by administration officials in news briefings, speeches and twitter feeds is overstated.
"The president needs to show leadership," said Mr. Jindal, who was in Washington for a governors' meeting. "There's no reason…you would have to jeopardize people's access to vaccines, children's access to education; the reality is, this is just a part of a political theater."
Some Republicans seem to have accepted that the administration would need more flexibility than it now has under the law to make the cuts less harmful. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.) has drafted legislation that would give the defense secretary more latitude to administer the cuts. That bill is likely to be expanded to give similar flexibility to domestic agency heads, in a bid to draw bipartisan support.
Mr. Inhofe's bill may come up later this week during Senate debate on Democrats' bill to replace the sequester cuts with a package of $110 billion of more-gradual deficit-reduction measures, including both tax increases and spending cuts.
However, Pentagon controller Robert Hale suggested at a news conference last week that at this point, such leeway would be little help. "I know that there have been suggestions that, well, we can…solve this problem by giving flexibility," he said. "I don't think it would help that much this far into the fiscal year."
—Janet Hook
and Dion Nissenbaum contributed to this article.Write to Peter Nicholas at [email protected] and Damian Paletta at [email protected]
Constrained by laws governing the way it spends money approved by Congress, the White House said there is little it can do to spare Americans what it said would be a range of hardships unless Congress finds a way to delay or cancel the $85 billion of cuts, known as the sequester, due to take effect through September.
That argument helps the White House try to put pressure on congressional Republicans to negotiate a substitute deficit-reduction plan. But administration officials say it is true, nonetheless.
On air travel, for example, the administration said it likely wouldn't be able to prevent long delays while also ensuring public safety. Roughly all of the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic controllers would be subject to mandatory unpaid leave, the agency said. In addition, agents for the Transportation Security Administration and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection would face cutbacks and furlough, Janet Napolitano, head of the Department of Homeland Security, said Monday.
But some Republicans remain unconvinced. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) tweeted on Monday: "Airport delays are preventable: Currently billions of waste & unspent funds at DHS."
The answer to how much the administration can control what exactly is cut may not be known until the deadline hits and agency heads begin making adjustments to live within the tighter budgets.
For now, neither political party sees a way to avert the sequester. No serious negotiations are under way, and on Tuesday President Barack Obama heads to a shipyard in southern Virginia to highlight the potential economic toll.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said Monday that he hopes the week doesn't pass without negotiations. The president and congressional leadership should meet "around a table, eyeball to eyeball," Mr. Kaine said.
One White House official said Monday that the sequester, which grew out of the summer 2011 deal to raise the nation's borrowing limit, was "designed not to be flexible." It was written to ensure that the cuts are leveled at every "program, project, and activity" within each individual budget account, the White House said.
But a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, suggested the dire portrait presented by administration officials in news briefings, speeches and twitter feeds is overstated.
"The president needs to show leadership," said Mr. Jindal, who was in Washington for a governors' meeting. "There's no reason…you would have to jeopardize people's access to vaccines, children's access to education; the reality is, this is just a part of a political theater."
Some Republicans seem to have accepted that the administration would need more flexibility than it now has under the law to make the cuts less harmful. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.) has drafted legislation that would give the defense secretary more latitude to administer the cuts. That bill is likely to be expanded to give similar flexibility to domestic agency heads, in a bid to draw bipartisan support.
Mr. Inhofe's bill may come up later this week during Senate debate on Democrats' bill to replace the sequester cuts with a package of $110 billion of more-gradual deficit-reduction measures, including both tax increases and spending cuts.
However, Pentagon controller Robert Hale suggested at a news conference last week that at this point, such leeway would be little help. "I know that there have been suggestions that, well, we can…solve this problem by giving flexibility," he said. "I don't think it would help that much this far into the fiscal year."
—Janet Hook
and Dion Nissenbaum contributed to this article.Write to Peter Nicholas at [email protected] and Damian Paletta at [email protected]