Pentagon officials insist there’s no way such deep cuts would actually be implemented. The cuts no one believes will come

Amid all the chatter on Capitol Hill about looming defense cuts, there’s one thing no one’s saying out loud: The cuts will probably never happen.

Despite the gloom and doom from the Pentagon, the hand-wringing from Republicans and the resistance to changing the so-called sequester from Hill Democrats, the conventional wisdom among people involved in negotiations is that there will probably be a compromise to avoid the $500 billion in cuts.


Republicans in a bipartisan working group are openly talking about finding new revenue as a way to temporarily stave off the defense cuts. The White House budget director wrote in an op-ed Tuesday that the sequester “wasn’t meant to be implemented.”

And Pentagon officials insist there’s no way such deep cuts would ever go into effect.

“Much of what we plan for in this building is for things that might actually happen. We typically don’t plan against absurdities,” said Pentagon spokesman George Little.

There also seems to be a more serious level of engagement between Democrats and Republicans on how to avoid the $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts over 10 years, as a January deadline ticks closer and talk of defense industry pink slips intensifies. While Pentagon leaders have been most vocal, the sequester also includes hundreds of billions in cuts to domestic funds and social safety net programs — something liberal Democrats are fighting to avoid.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has resisted any dealmaking on the sequester, perhaps holding out for leverage on other year-end tax and spending issues that Congress must act on.

But two leading GOP voices on the Armed Services Committee, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, are heading up a bipartisan group of senators working to reach a deal before the November election and punting sequestration for another year. To do so, the group, which meets again next week, is trying to find $110 billion in offsets for fiscal 2013, including “revenue” that many in the GOP have scoffed at in the past.

That could come in the form of closing loopholes, selling federal property or increasing fees, Graham said. A potential agreement would resemble a “mini-Bowles-Simpson deal,” modeled off a plan produced by President Barack Obama’s fiscal commission that called for a 3-1 ratio of cuts to revenue increases.

“I think we can do a one-year fix if Republicans can put some revenue on the table,” said Graham, an Air Force reservist who declined to identify members of the “small but growing” working group. “Once we do that, it will become easier to get Democrats to help with the $60 [billion] or $70 billion [in cuts] that we will have to find throughout the other parts of the government.”

McCain, a Vietnam veteran and the ranking member on the Armed Services panel, said he’s been in regular contact with Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

For Republicans, revenue has always been the sticking point during past deficit talks. So it’s encouraging — and a bit surprising — to some Democrats that key Republicans now appear to be speaking the same language.

“If Republicans are willing to come to the table and have revenue on the table in order to resolve this … we can get to a decision and not go to sequestration,” said Murray, whose state is home to Boeing facilities and other defense firms.

Added Levin: “I’m optimistic that we can find something we can agree on on at least a general outline.”

The White House, too, has taken a more hands-on role as lawmakers grope for a solution. After weeks of rebuffing the GOP’s requests, Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Jeff Zients has agreed to testify before the House Armed Services Committee on the impact of the sequester, a move that could spur congressional leaders to get more serious about the cuts and that Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) views as “a step in the right direction,” his spokesman said.

And in a POLITICO op-ed Tuesday, Zients acknowledged for the first time that his budget office has begun studying how it would implement the sequester if Congress fails to find a solution. But he added that Congress had intentionally made the automatic cuts so “destructive” in last year’s debt limit law, the Budget Control Act, lawmakers would have no other option but to cut the deficit.

“That is by design. As President Barack Obama has said many times, the sequester wasn’t meant to be implemented,” he wrote. “It was designed to cause cuts so deep that just threatening them would force members of Congress to agree on a big, balanced package of deficit reduction.”

For now, the Pentagon is letting the White House take the lead — and so far, there’s no indication the cuts will actually occur. Though Pentagon officials have been meeting with OMB officials daily, they haven’t been instructed to plan for cuts that are supposedly just six months away.

“The goal here, of course, is to avoid sequestration, period,” said Little, the Pentagon’s spokesman. “That’s what we want, and we believe that’s what the American people want. We can’t afford sequestration.”

The idea that the Pentagon isn’t planning for such massive, devastating cuts, is absurd to some defense insiders.

“If they have done no thinking, talking or meeting about this issue, they should all be fired,” said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. “You have to think they’ve been meeting or talking. There are lots of options for them, depending how you read the law and how you read the history of sequester.”

McKeon has frequently pointed out that the House voted in May to halt the defense cuts for one year by reducing money for food stamps and other social services. And he’s said he’ll consider any proposal that passes the Democratic-controlled Senate.

But the GOP chairman poured cold water on talk that a small, independent group of lawmakers could save the Pentagon from painful cuts.

“There has been a lot of chatter recently about bipartisan and bicameral working groups to resolve these disastrous cuts to the military,” said McKeon spokesman Claude Chafin. “Chairman McKeon is mindful that regular order embraces such working groups. They are called conference committees, and they occur after both chambers have acted.”

Graham, however, said his working group can serve another function as well. When things like cancer research, food inspectors and air traffic controllers start facing cuts — and defense firms start publishing layoff notices — that will get lawmakers’ attention. Lockheed Martin Corp. officials already have warned they may have to issue 100,000 layoff notices because of federal reporting rules that require them to give a 60-day notice. That would fall on Nov. 2, just days before the election.

”When that hits, that will make Congress move more than anything I can think of,” Graham said.

Manu Raju and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.