The president and his Democratic allies say that Republicans have put at risk the nation’s defenses. W.H.: Sequester 'deeply destructive'

President Barack Obama on Friday detailed how roughly $120 billion in cuts to the Pentagon and domestic programs will be applied if Congress doesn’t shut off a planned “sequester” before the end of the year, renewing an election-year political brawl over who is to blame for the nation’s budget woes.

POLITICO obtained an advance copy of the 394-page White House report, which shed little new light on the sword of Damocles hanging over Washington’s head but sharpened its political point.


( Also on POLITICO: What is sequestration?)

The report confirms in painstaking detail which budget accounts are subject to cuts — down to the congressional visitors center — and which are exempt. And it is likely to add new urgency to efforts to stop the cuts from taking effect.

“No amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote. “”The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.”

The fight over spending cuts will be unavoidable on the campaign trail. Obama faces the specter of deep reductions to Pentagon accounts — and the layoffs that defense firms say will accompany them — and Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the GOP’s top budget negotiator in the House. If things fall apart, both will be blamed by their political opponents.

Republicans agreed with the president that the automatic cuts could have a devastating effect on the nation but accused him of failing to put forward a workable plan to avoid them.

”The release today of a report detailing across-the-board budget cuts—including the cuts to national security that the President demanded during last year’s budget negotiations—highlights the crippling effect these reductions will have on our nation’s security and underscores the urgent need for the President to work with congressional Republicans to replace these destructive cuts,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “[W]hile the report claims that the president has offered ‘balanced and comprehensive deficit reduction’ solutions, his plan was so unserious that it was rejected by every single member of Congress.”

The overview: There would be a 9.4 percent cut to most defense programs — except those exempted in the sequestration law — and a 10 percent cut to a handful of other Pentagon accounts that are not subject to annual congressional appropriations. Medicare would get hit with a 2 percent cut, while domestic discretionary programs — such as scientific grants and Education Department programs — would be subject to 8.2 percent cuts. Most mandatory domestic programs — those that are funded based on eligibility — would be slashed by 7.6 percent.

The president and his Democratic allies say that Republicans have put at risk the nation’s defenses — and important domestic programs — in the name of preserving Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Republicans counter that Obama and congressional Democrats insisted on including the Pentagon in the automatic cuts as part of a landmark 2011 debt-limit deal.

”While the Department of Defense would be able to shift funds to ensure war fighting and critical military readiness capabilities were not degraded, sequestration would result in a reduction in readiness of many non-deployed units, delays in investments in new equipment and facilities, cutbacks in equipment repairs, declines in military research and development efforts, and reductions in base services for military families,” the president’s aides wrote.

Moreover, they argued, “sequestration would undermine investments vital to economic growth, threaten the safety and security of the American people, and cause severe harm to programs that benefit the middle-class, seniors and children.”

The hit list: Education grants, money for the FBI and border patrol agents, air traffic control management, safety measures for food and drinking water, and scientific research, among others.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said the Pentagon cuts could be reversed if Republicans are willing to raise taxes on corporations.

”It will happen the moment that Republicans decide that it is more important to protect defense spending than it is to protect tax breaks for oil companies and other special interests,” Van Hollen told POLITICO. “Republicans talk a big game on defense. They just don’t want to pay for it.”

The GOP contingent on Capitol Hill says raising taxes is the wrong way to go.

“The most sensible way to achieve the $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction required by the Budget Control Act is through commonsense spending reform, not a weakened national defense,” Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the fourth-ranking House Republican, said.

But many of Democrats’ favorite programs, including Social Security and Medicaid, were exempted from the pain as part of that debt-limit agreement, possibly leaving Obama less room to portray Republicans as insensitive to the needs of the most impoverished Americans.

Still, Democrats say Republicans would cut anything, including their beloved defense programs, to avoid tax increases that could be used to offset the planned spending reductions.

Many lawmakers have cast “sequestration” as a form of torture too painful to bear — both for the Pentagon and the domestic agencies that would have to make do with much smaller budgets than those to which they are accustomed. For that reason, there is optimism in some corners on Capitol Hill that Congress and the president will act to “turn off” the sequester before it takes effect next year. In particular, the Defense Department’s allies on Capitol Hill have emphasized comments from Obama’s own defense team indicating that big cuts would have a crippling effect on the Pentagon’s operations.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, lawmakers and administration officials say.

Congress and the president agreed to impose these across-the-board cuts to government programs when they cut a deal to raise the debt limit in 2011. The idea was to spur lawmakers and the president to come up with surgical budget cuts — or tax increases — rather than suffer the blunt force trauma of automatic reductions affecting everything but Social Security, Medicaid and a handful of other programs that assist the most impoverished Americans.

A “supercommittee”of legislators was designated to come up with a replacement plan, but that panel failed to make any progress on a deficit-reduction proposal. Fearful that the administration could play games in applying the cuts, Congress passed a law earlier this year requiring the White House to report on how the president would spread the pain.

Correction: The White House report is 394 pages long.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Alysha Love @ 09/14/2012 02:40 PM CORRECTION: The White House report is 394 pages long.