From the WSJ:
And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the
sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and
the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation's ability to forecast
severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornadoes, was
seriously undermined.
Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded.
Or so President Obama and his Cabinet prophets have been preaching
ahead of the automatic budget cuts due to begin Friday. The bit about
the weather is a real quote from the White House budget director.
But if any of these cataclysms do come
to pass, then they will be mostly Mr. Obama's own creation. The truth is
that the sequester already gives the White House the legal flexibility
to avoid doom, if a 5% cut to programs that have increased more than 17%
on average over the Obama Presidency counts as doom.
According to Mr. Obama and his budget office,
the sequester cuts are indiscriminate and spell out specific
percentages that will be subtracted from federal "projects, programs and
activities," or PPAs. Except for the exemptions in the 2011 budget
deal, the White House says it must now cut across the board regardless
of how important a given PPA is. Food inspectors, say, will be treated
the same as subsidies for millionaire farmers.
Not so fast. Programs, projects and activities are a technical
category of the federal budget, but the sequester actually occurs at the
roughly 1,200 broader units known as budget accounts. Some accounts are
small, but others contain hundreds of PPAs and the larger accounts run
to billions of dollars. For the Pentagon in particular, the distinction
between PPAs and accounts is huge. This means in most cases the
President has the room to protect his "investments" while managing the
fiscal transition over time.
Congress might have intended for the sequester to apply to PPAs, but
they also wrote a sloppy law at the 11th hour. The Budget Control Act of
2011 disinterred the lapsed sequester rules of the Gramm-Rudman Deficit
Control Act of 1985, though without anyone looking at the details.
Gramm-Rudman said the sequester applies to accounts, not PPAs, under a
temporary "part-year" budget. As it happens the government is operating
under just such a continuing resolution now, not a normal
appropriations bill. If Congress returned to regular order in 2014 or
later, the sequester would indeed trickle down to PPAs.
The White House has even more discretion than this. When Gramm-Rudman
led to a 4.3% sequester in 1986, Congress passed a special bill that
created the category of PPAs and spent 1,119 pages defining what they
were for 1986. Congress has never done anything of the sort since, and
thus as the government has grown PPA definitions now vary among Cabinet
departments and sometimes even account to account in the same
department.
Lacking legislation, the White House assigns
these amorphous units in its annual budget. Even if the lawyers insisted
the sequester must apply to "PPAs" per se, the budgeteers could
formally construe PPAs in ways that preserve a work-around.
This White House has never been fussy when a statutory text or even
the Constitution interferes with its political ambitions. (See
ObamaCare, immigration executive orders, recess appointments and much
else.) Could it be that Mr. Obama is exaggerating the legal stringency
of the sequester in a gambit to force Congress to shut it off?
In any case, Republicans in Congress are
prepared to give Mr. Obama still more spending flexibility than he
already has to mitigate any damage, real or imagined. One option is to
lock in spending at post-sequester levels and grant department heads
so-called transfer authority to shift cash between accounts, after
consultation with the committees on the Hill.
Mr. Obama ought to love that, since it is precisely the
administrative state he says he wants—the rule of technocrats who
evaluate budget priorities without political interference. But liberals
are now howling about more liberal executive power because this plan
would also very modestly reduce the size of government.
It would also negate Mr. Obama's days-of-wrath sequester campaign. To wit:
If air traffic control and airport security really are the models of
government efficiency that anyone who has ever traveled knows they are
not, perhaps Homeland Security could begin by targeting some of the
programs identified by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn this week. These
include necessities such as grants for a security conference in San
Diego that featured "zombie apocalypse training" or funds for towns like
Keene, New Hampshire (pop. 23,000) to purchase armored tank-like
vehicles called Bearcats. Seriously.
Before furloughing park rangers, maybe start with the 10% of the
75,000 Department of the Interior employees who are conserving the
wilderness of Washington, D.C. Before slashing cancer research, stop
funding the $130-million-a-year National Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine that studies herbs and yoga. Cut after-school
funding only after consolidating the 105 federal programs meant to
encourage kids to take math and science classes.
Neither the legal details of the sequester nor the practical work of
reforming government are as interesting to the media as Mr. Obama's
invocations of plagues and pestilence. The real revelation is that if
the world does end, it will be Mr. Obama's choice.
SoRo: Of course, Mr Obama's real goal isn't to reach a deal or to avoid catastrophe. His real intention is to inflict as much pain on the American people and make sure that they blame the Republicans. He wants no opposition. He wants to be seen as the man, who is without blame, who has the only "common sensical" plan, who is a healer and uniter, who is "fighting for the little guy against the wealthy, entrenched, special interests," and who is the last, great hope for all mankind.
He thrives amidst chaos. It was the environment in which he grew up as a child. His idea of "normalcy" is an anathema to most of us. He must continuously agitate for several reasons: 1) it keeps everyone else off balance; 2) it allows him to do what he could not otherwise do; 3) while people are focusing on one hand, the other hand is moving on something else; and, most injuriously, 4) it grinds and wears the people down to the point when they just throw up their hands and say, "Just do whatever you want. We just cannot take it anymore."
Novices will say that this is "The Rules For Radicals." Those with a more learned eye on history will recognise many traits and beliefs shared with Louis XIV, Robespierre, Cromwell, Marat, Galton, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Marx, Engels, Eckart, Haushofer, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Ho Chi Minh, Popper and many others.
