WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans controlling
the House moved Monday to give the Pentagon more money for military
readiness while
easing the pain felt by such agencies as the FBI and the Border
Patrol from the across-the-board spending cuts that are just
starting to take effect.
The effort is part of a huge spending measure that would fund day-to-day federal operations through September — and head off
a potential government shutdown later this month.
The measure would leave in place automatic
cuts of 5 percent to domestic agencies and 7.8 percent to the Pentagon
ordered
by President Barack Obama Friday night after months of battling
with Republicans over the budget. But the House Republicans'
legislation would award the Defense and Veterans Affairs
departments their detailed 2013 budgets while other agencies would
be frozen at 2012 levels — and then bear the across-the-board
cuts.
The impact of the new cuts was proving slow to reach the broader public as Obama convened the first Cabinet meeting of his
second term to discuss next steps.
The Pentagon did say it would furlough
thousands of military school teachers around the world and close
commissaries an extra
day each week. And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
said the spending cuts were causing delays in customs lines
at airports including Los Angeles International and O'Hare
International in Chicago.
Obama said he was continuing to seek out Republican partners to reach a deal to ease or head off the cuts, but there was no
sign that a breakthrough was in the works to reverse them.
The new GOP funding measure is set to advance through the House on Wednesday. It's aimed at preventing a government shutdown
when a six-month spending bill passed last September runs out March 27.
The latest measure would provide an increase
for military operations and maintenance efforts as well as veterans'
health programs
but would put most the rest of the government on budget autopilot.
After accounting for the across-the-board
cuts, domestic agencies would face reductions exceeding 5 percent when
compared
with last year. But Republicans would carve out a host of
exemptions seeking to protect certain functions, including federal
prisons and fire-fighting efforts in the West, and to provide new
funding for embassy security and modernizing the U.S. nuclear
arsenal. The FBI and the Border Patrol would be able to maintain
current staffing levels and would not have to furlough employees.
The legislation would provide about $2
billion more than the current level to increase security at U.S.
embassies and diplomatic
missions worldwide. Last September, a terrorist attack on the U.S.
diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, killed Ambassador
Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
A project to repair the Capitol Dome in Washington could stay on track, and NASA would be protected from the harshest effects
of the automatic cuts, known in Washington as a sequester.
The across-the-board cuts would carve $85
billion in spending from the government's $3.6 trillion budget for this
year, concentrating
the cuts in the approximately $1 trillion allocated to the
day-to-day agency operating budgets set by Congress each year.
Those so-called discretionary accounts received big boosts in the
first two years of Obama's presidency when Democrats controlled
Congress but have borne the brunt of the cuts approved as Obama
and Republicans have grappled over the budget.
Both Democrats and Republicans for months
have warned the cuts are draconian and would slow the growth of the
economy and
cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office, for instance, says they would slow the economy
by 0.6 percent and cost about 750,000 jobs.
Obama presided Monday over the first meeting of his new-look Cabinet in a sobering climate of fiscal belt-tightening, urging
humane management of spending cuts for communities and families that are "going to be hurting."
"We can manage through it," the president
told reporters. Obama and members of his Cabinet had been warning for
weeks that
the cuts would be painful, but the fact is they will be slow to
take effect, with the first furloughs of government workers
not due until next month. Cuts to many programs may go unnoticed
entirely.
The White House budget office's 83-page
sequestration order was released Friday evening, detailing the cuts to
more than 1,000
separate government accounts, big and small. Cuts of 7.8 percent
that are set to strike defense accounts include $5.2 billion
for construction at Army bases. Other accounts are far smaller,
like $32 million to operate and maintain the St. Lawrence
Seaway.
Each agency is supposed to apportion the
cuts equally to each "program, project and activity" within the broader
accounts,
which gives agency heads some flexibility since it's up to them to
define what that means. And it's not clear what recourse
others would have if they disagreed with an agency's choices.
"That leaves it pretty much to the administrators in the agency in which that account falls to determine how he's planning
on applying it," said G. William Hoagland, a budget expert with the Bipartisan Policy Center. "I don't know that anybody's
going to be held accountable if some administrator defines a project the way he wants to define it."