Sen. Sessions: GOP Distrusts Obama, But We Might Backload Sequester [View all]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/06/20/sen-sessions-gop-distrusts-obama-but-we-might-backload-sequester/



Sen. Sessions: GOP Distrusts Obama, But We Might Backload Sequester
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 20, 2013 at 6:18 PM

CAPITOL HILL: On issues from nuclear weapons to the spending cuts known as sequestration, political common ground has turned into a war-torn no-man’s-land where both sides fear to tread. That intractable divide between the parties was on full display this morning at One Constitution Avenue, across the street from the US Capitol, where Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions expressed Republicans’ deep, wide-ranging, and sometimes outright emotional distrust of President Barrack Obama.

Amidst the bitterness, however, Sessions held out a slender reed of hope for some kind of compromise that would slow sequestration down, if not reduce its 10-year total. Pentagon officials have been pushing for such “backloading” for months, starting with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno in April and with Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey joining in a week and a half ago.

“Will Defense have to take some more reductions? Yes,” he told me after his public remarks at a breakfast at the Capitol Hill headquarters of the influential Reserve Officers’ Association (ROA). But, he went on, “falling this rapidly will have more costs than… a phased-in reduction.” A “dramatic drop” in spending from one year to the next, instead of bringing the budget down on a steady curve over time, leads to inefficient and even counterproductive cuts, he argued.

Does that mean Sessions and his Republican colleagues might agree to backloaded cuts, where the ten-year total still came to $500 billion but the annual figure was below $50 billion in the early years and rose above $50 billion in the second half of the decade?



unhappycamper comment: This “dramatic drop” that Sessions is is talking about is a five percent budget cut. Five fucking percent.