When lawmakers agreed to put off the looming sequester by two months to give themselves more time to hammer out a deficit-reduction deal, they also added a little protection for the Defense Department and other federal agencies in case Congress and the White House fail to reach an agreement by March 1.
The original sequester trigger, which was scheduled to hit Jan. 2, would have slashed $109 billion from fiscal 2013 discretionary spending accounts -- about $54 billion of which would have been carved indiscriminately from defense spending in the last nine months of the fiscal year.
But the cleared fiscal cliff deal (HR 8), which postpones sequestration, would reduce the size of the across-the-board discretionary spending cuts this year by $24 billion, reflecting the fact that federal agencies would have only seven months to implement the sequester. That brings the potential cut to defense accounts this year down to $42 billion.
In short, the reduction in the monthly discretionary spending rate would stay the same. But the reduction in the overall annual budget is less than under the original sequester.
"The result is that they punted for two months, but it was a clean punt. It does not require a deeper reduction," said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "They reduce the amount of the reduction proportionally."
Otherwise, the Defense Department, which last week put pressure on Congress to address the across-the-board cuts as part of the deal on the fiscal cliff, would have had less time to implement this year's sequester cuts if there was no deal by March 1. That would have only added to the accounting and management headache for a department that has called the sequester catastrophic.
Lawmakers "could have very easily made it harder. That is a silver lining, I guess," Harrison added.