For months, lawmakers and military leaders have issued dire predictions about what might happen if Congress doesn’t stop the $500 billion in automatic defense spending cuts set to start in January/.../
Experts doubt that/.../
Those automatic cuts, known as sequestration, were supposed to be painful not just because of their size but also because of how they’ll be implemented, said Todd Harrison, a fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“The way the law is written, these cuts are uniform across all the agency accounts,” he said. “The law said the president could exempt personnel funds from sequestration, but everything else would be affected.”
That includes most of the billions set aside for fighting in Afghanistan each year. Carter told House members earlier this month that the across-the-board mandate means that operations and maintenance accounts for fighting in Afghanistan can’t be fully protected.
Army and Marine Corps officials declined to say exactly what that would mean for training and equipping troops. Carter said the department will have some flexibility to push the impact of budget cuts onto future deploying units, rather than hurting those already serving in Afghanistan.
However, “it is not possible to devise a plan that negates these consequences substantially,” he told the lawmakers.
Harrison said of all the sequestration threats “this one is less overplayed than the others.” Unless a deal is reached, the budget cuts will squeeze resources available for combat training and pre-deployment preparation.
But that doesn’t completely handcuff the Pentagon.
“What the Defense Department can do is ask Congress to move money around to cover that,” he said. “They couldn’t just reassign the money, they’d need permission to move those funds. But I can’t see any way Congress would refuse that.”