WASHINGTON – The 2012 presidential debates have produced plenty of memorable moments with heated confrontations, endless calls for fact-checking and lots of prepared zingers. However, what might be the most poignant moment in the debates came on Monday night when President Barack Obama said that sequestration “will not happen”.
According to the Budget Control Act that was put in place during the summer of 2011, if Congress fails to come up with a new resolution to address the mounting deficit, $500 billion will automatically be cut, or sequestered, from the defense budget in 2013.
In the aftermath of the debate, White House senior adviser David Plouffe attempted to make the presidents statements less definitive, saying that the president was agreeing with the sentiments of many in Washington who believe that sequestration should not happen.
The threat of cuts to the defense budget has become a hotly contested issue with fears of decreased national security and more immediately, massive job loss if the fiscal cliff is not resolved.
Even after the president’s statement, it’s unclear whether or not deep defense cuts will take place in 2013, but they don’t need to, according to Alex Rothman, a Research Associate at the progressive Center for American Progress. “Sequestration is a very solvable problem,” he said.
California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa recently brought additional attention to potential job cuts when he wrote to large defense contractors inquiring about whether or not the Office of Management and Budget had discouraged them from issuing notices of impending layoffs in accordance with Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
The automatic cuts that would kick in if sequestration comes to pass are a “sloppy” and undesirable means of cutting defense spending, but the sheer amount is less of a problem than the method, Rothman said.
“Even if sequestration is happening it would take the defense budget back to 2007 levels, contractors were doing fine then. This is an industry that has seen their profits quadruple in the past decade,” said Rothman.
Ultimately the issue of cutting the defense budget brings to light a threat to the United States that does not come from outside forces, said Rothman: “One of our greatest threats is self-made, it’s our inability to compromise on the budget.”