President Barack Obama will protect all accounts used to pay for military personnel from deep spending cuts that would kick in Jan. 2 if lawmakers fail to pass a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction measure, placing a bulls eye on civilian employees and weapon programs/.../
"The formula for this is a uniform-percentage cut across all non-exempt accounts," says Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "So that $55 billion gets divided among all the various accounts."
And with the health care slice of the pie removed, "the cut would be even greater for weapon programs, operations and maintenance accounts and Defense Department civilian employees," says Harrison.
For those civilian workers, "you could have some of them getting layoff notices before Election Day in November," Harrison says.