The longer the sequester is in effect, the more we’re learning that it’s not quite the fiscal straightjacket that it might have appeared to be at first.  Despite being billed as automatic spending cuts, the sequester is not an unalterable doomsday machine.

And in the weeks ahead Congress and the Obama administration will be under pressure from advocacy groups and special interests to find other ways to relax some of the fiscal constraints the law was supposed to apply.

Last week’s decision by Congress to explicitly give the Department of Transportation the power to shift $253 million in funds to the Federal Aviation Administration so as to avert furloughs of air traffic controllers was a reminder that despite the “automatic” cuts in the sequester, Congress is still making spending choices and sometimes second- guessing the choices made by executive branch officials.

Even before last week, Congress had already delayed by three months and reduced by $24 billion the size of the spending cuts mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Addressing the spending cuts at his press conference Tuesday President Barack Obama said, “The only way we're going to lift it (the sequester) is if we do a bigger deal that meets the test of lowering our deficit and growing our economy at the same time. And that's going to require some compromises on the part of both Democrats and Republicans.”

Obama said he had had “some good conversations with Republican senators so far. Those conversations are continuing. I think there's a genuine desire on many of their parts to move past not only sequester, but Washington dysfunction.”

He said he wanted “to do everything we can to create a permission structure” for congressional Republicans to agree with him on an alternative set of spending curbs and tax increases as a substitute for the sequester.

But he rejected the notion that “my job is to somehow get them (congressional Republicans) to behave.”

And he noted that the funding fix that allowed the FAA furloughs to be averted came from “shifting money that's designed to repair and improve airports over the long term to fix the short-term problem. Well that's not a solution.”

Obama explained why he will sign the FAA furlough fix into law by saying, “Frankly, I don't think that if I were to veto, for example, this FAA bill, that that somehow would lead to the broader fix. It just means that there'd be pain now -- which they would try to blame on me -- as opposed to paying five years from now.”

Meanwhile, some Democratic members of Congress are using their week back in their home states and districts to press for more easing of the cuts. On Tuesday Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray, D- Wash., will be hosting an event with cancer, diabetes and other medical researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to highlight the effects of the spending cuts on medical research. 

Also Tuesday in Tampa, Fla., Rep. Kathy Castor, D- Fla., is holding a press conference with the Hillsborough County Head Start director and local parents to protest the sequester’s effect on the Head Start program.

Obama spokesman Jay Carney on Monday didn’t flatly rule out the idea of the president signing other ad hoc adjustments to the spending cuts if Congress were to pass them.

As with the FAA legislation, loosening the sequester’s constraints might in some cases simply be a matter of re-programming, or shifting around, money within a department’s accounts.

But it does not seem likely that there would be a majority in the House or a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to rescind the five percent reduction in non-defense discretionary funding (for items such as diabetes research) or the eight percent reduction in defense discretionary funding.

And a House-passed Republican sequester replacement bill (substituting other cuts for the ones currently in force) won’t be passed by the Senate.

So for now Congress is limited to giving executive branch officials flexibility in how they manage their funds.

As painful as the cuts might be, Obama administration officials insist that they are not trying to make them feel or appear more painful than they are.

In fact in some cases, it seems as if Obama administration officials have made chosen the less draconian approach to using their reduced finding – an approach that may have a less visible or dramatic impact on people using federal services or facilities. Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service, told a House committee two weeks ago that he’d decided to not close any national parks entirely, but instead to spread the sequester’s impact by reducing operating hours and reducing services at some parks.

This underscores the point that the sequester isn’t a government shutdown – no “closed due to sequester” signs will appear at Yosemite or Crater Lake.

And the pain an individual person might feel depends on which federal program he or she is a beneficiary of.

As was true from the beginning -- but has sometimes been lost sight of – the spending cuts weren’t designed to be applied across the board. Exempt from the spending cuts are entitlement programs such as Medicaid, as well as military salaries, and programs for the poor such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In some cases, the very same people who stand to lose from cuts in one program – such as Meals on Wheels – will still be exempt from cuts in another, such as Medicaid.

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 30, 2013 9:51 AM EDT

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill on Friday to give the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flexibility to defray spending cuts from its budget as part of the sequester, allowing the agency to restore furloughed air traffic controllers whose absences had spurred nationwide flight delays.

The House moved quickly late Friday morning to follow the lead of the Senate, which unanimously approved legislation late Thursday evening to give the secretary of transportation increased authority to transfer funds from its existing budget to restore furloughed air traffic controllers.

The legislation heads to the White House next for President Barack Obama's signature. White House press secretary Jay Carney said at his press briefing on Friday that Obama would sign the legislation.

Though some House Democrats griped on Friday that the air traffic controller furloughs should provide the impetus for Congress to address all of the cuts prescribed by the sequester, the House easily cleared the two-thirds procedural threshold it needed to approve the FAA patch. 

The sequester, a series of $85 billion in automatic spending cuts applied across all government agencies, started on March 1. It was an outgrowth of the 2011 agreement between Congress and the Obama administration to raise the debt ceiling, and only took effect because of their subsequent inability to reach an alternative fiscal agreement.

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This story was originally published on Fri Apr 26, 2013 12:13 PM EDT

It’s not yet been two months since the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester went into effect, but some members of Congress are already unhappy with the results.  

Congress passed those cuts in the Budget Control Act two summers ago as a fallback plan, hoping to spark a deal to control the national debt.  But that idea backfired and the fallback plan became operative.

The sequester exempts most entitlement benefits, and thus falls almost entirely on the discretionary, or annually appropriated, programs, from national parks to airport control towers.

Congressional Democrats keep hoping that the budget bargain that wasn’t reached in 2011 will somehow be found this year which would allow the sequester to be cancelled.

But at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, ranking Republican member Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma assured the witness, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, that the sequester “is going to stay.”

He added after the hearing, “That money is not coming back…. There isn’t going to be a Republican who’s going to vote to take that spending reduction away.” (Coburn voted against the Budget Control Act.)

He added “As stupid as the sequester is, and how we did it, the benefit of the sequester is that it’s causing everybody to re-think everything, what’s important, what’s not, what a priority, what’s not.”

Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano speaks about the effects of the sequester from the White House in Washington February 25, 2013. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

And in her testimony on the Department of Homeland Security’s spending request for the new fiscal year, Napolitano did not say that the sequester is forcing her department to jeopardize public safety by, for example, skimping on border patrols. She did tell senators that the more than $3 billion in cuts having to be absorbed in just six months was “having significant effects.” The cuts “will affect operations in the short and long term.” She pledged to “do everything we can to minimize the impacts on our core mission and our employees.”

A high-profile sequester casualty – control towers at smaller airports – was the focus of Tuesday’s Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing featuring Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator Michael Huerta.

Spending cuts have led the FAA schedule the closing of 149 air traffic control towers across the nation. But please, not in my state, both Republican and Democratic senators told Huerta.

“Why close Nashua's tower? I certainly don't want you to close Lebanon's too, but it seems a little arbitrary to me,” complained Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R- N.H., referring to the FAA’s decision to close an airport tower in Nashua, Ayotte’s home town but to keep one in Lebanon, N.H., which gets less traffic, operating.

Huerta explained some of the arcane points of airport funding and then told Ayotte that Nashua was a tower that fell below the FAA’s measure of 150,000 annual operations and 10,000 commercial operations. So it will lose its federal funding.

Ayotte was one of the 26 senators voted against the sequester in 2011 but Sen. Mark Pryor, D- Ark, one of the 74 who voted for it and who is up for re-election next year, also complained to Huerta at Tuesday’s hearing about the closing of the tower at the Texarkana airport.

Huerta explained to Pryor that all but one of the 149 towers FAA will close in June is already closed “for a significant portion of every day. And so, they have existing rules of how they operate in a non-towered capacity. And therefore, when they convert to 24-hour non-towered operations, they simply revert to those rules.” Huerta added later “We’re not doing anything that is not safe.” But he said, “in order to maintain the highest levels of safety, what you sacrifice is efficiency.”

He’ll need to furlough 47,000 FAA employees for up to 11 days between April 21 and Sept. 30 and as a result, at the largest hub airports travelers will undergo up to 90-minute delays during the peak travel periods. But he said, “As we to undergo the difficult process of implementing the deep cuts required by the sequester, we refuse to sacrifice safety.”

Summing up the effects of the spending cuts on the FAA’s modernization plan for air traffic control, Commerce Committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D- W.V., called it “a terrible situation” and “incomprehensible – but there it is.” He added that the delay in the implementation of Next Gen, the new air traffic control system, would be “awful and dangerous.” Rockefeller voted for the Budget Control Act.

On the House side of the Capitol, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Tuesday scrutinized how three agencies ­-- the National Park Service, the Smithsonian and the National Archives -- that deal with the tourists who visit the nation’s capital are coping with the spending cuts.

Republicans used the hearing to attack National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis for not starting to plan for the sequester back in 2011. The National Archives implemented a hiring freeze in 2011 but the Park Service did not.

Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R- Calif. – who voted for the sequester as did 268 other House members – called the spending cuts “the first real down payment on reducing the size of government in my twelve-plus years on the Hill,” but also called the sequester “the worst possible way to save money.” 

Yet, he said, some executive branch officials – such as Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, who runs the agency that displays the original Constitution and Declaration of Independence – had frugally managed their money and made the effect of the sequester “less onerous than it would otherwise be.”

Jarvis told the committee, “No national parks are closing – what we’re doing is reducing operating hours, reducing services at some of them, reducing the ranger-led programs, as well as maintenance.” He added that he could have chosen to close 70 to 100 smaller national park sites, but “we chose to spread the impact across all units, reducing services but not actually closing any individual park.”

Rep. Mark Meadows, R- N.C., whose district includes parts Great Smoky Mountains National Park, told Jarvis that signs had gone up in his district saying that the Park Service is closing operations due to sequestration. “I’m unaware of any signs,” Jarvis said, telling Meadows that he would instruct his subordinates to take them any such signs down.

And Jarvis said he was not aware of any order from his superiors to make the sequester as painful as possible.

“No, sir, we do not want to make this painful,” Jarvis told Meadows. But referring to the cuts in park services, he told Meadows that “there’s a difference between intentionally making them painful and the fact that they will be painful…. A cut of this level is painful by definition.”

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In solidarity with government employees facing the effects of the mandatory budget cuts under sequestration, Secretary of State John Kerry will follow President Obama’s lead and give 5 percent of his government salary to a charity that benefits State Department employees, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland announced today.

Kerry’s donation will be on top of his regular charitable contributions. The charity or charities haven't been decided yet.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Secretary of State John Kerry

“We have a number of employee charities that serve as -- that benefits folks who have been injured or killed in the line of duty. We have a number of charities that benefit children of our employees. We're still looking at the best choice and whether all of the money will go to one or whether it'll be spread,” Nuland said.

As Secretary of State, Kerry earns an annual salary of $183,500, and 5 percent of his salary is $9,175. But Kerry's wealth -- due to his wife's fortune -- is significantly greater than that salary.

But other major political figures -- including Vice President Biden, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- have yet to follow Obama's example.

Boehner's office tells NBC News that the speaker hasn't reached a decision yet.

Cantor spokesman Doug Heye says that the sequester has impacted the office's budget, but he declined to answer if the majority leader will give up 5% of his pay.

McConnell's office has so far been unable to answer if the Senate minority leader will give up 5% of his salary. But it maintains that he already returns a significant portion of his office's budget, not just during sequestration. 

NBC also has reached out to the offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but has yet to receive a response.

In his first major policy speech, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday that the spending reductions, or sequester, required by the 2011 Budget Control Act are forcing him and his subordinates to make the wrong types of cuts even as they’re trying to design a more efficient national security structure.

The sequester cuts are “having a disruptive and potentially damaging impact on the readiness of the force,” he said,  adding, “These quick and dramatic cuts would almost certainly require reductions in what have long been considered core military capabilities.”

Gary Cameron / Reuters

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gives a speech on fiscal defense spending at Ft. McNair in Washington April 3, 2013.

The funds available this fiscal year for defense – other than spending on military personnel – are being cut by about 8 percent. The Budget Control Act allows the president to exempt military pay from the spending cuts and President Barack Obama has done so.

The bigger challenge, Hagel said, is for Pentagon planners to make long-term structural changes and to confront three principal drivers of cost growth: overhead, personnel costs and the acquisition of new weapons systems.

Hagel approvingly quoted former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, who has warned that due to rising health care and retirement costs for both uniformed military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees, the Pentagon could be transformed from "an agency protecting the nation to an agency administering benefit programs.”

Hagel added, “We’re not going to be able to sustain the current personnel costs and retirement benefits—there will be no money in the budget for anything else.”

As of the end of 2012, the Defense Department had more than 760,000 civilian employees. Nearly 1.4 million people are serving in uniform.

Hagel implied that there are too many admirals and generals. He said, “The operational forces of the military -- measured in battalions, ships, and aircraft wings -- have shrunk dramatically since the Cold War era. Yet the three- and four-star command and support structures sitting atop these smaller fighting forces have stayed intact, with minor exceptions, and in some cases they are actually increasing in size and rank.”

Hagel delivered his speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington.

During the question-and-and-answer period that followed his speech, a Defense Department civilian employee complained about the impending furloughs of up to 14 days which Hagel defended as necessary under the circumstances.

“Morale will be affected, but tough decisions are going to have to be made,” he said.

Another civilian Defense Department employee told Hagel he “very much appreciated the gesture” that Hagel made by announcing he’ll take a pay cut to show his solidarity with those being furloughed.

As to weapons purchases, Hagel said that “the military's modernization strategy still depends on systems that are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for.” Weapons development programs “continue to take longer, cost more, and deliver less than initially planned and promised.”

Recently the Government Accountability Office kept the Pentagon on its annual High Risk List of departments whose books are so mysterious and opaque that it’s at high risk of fraud, waste and mismanagement. The GAO said that the Defense Department “is one of the few federal entities that cannot accurately account for its spending or assets.”

With between a 5 percent and 8 percent cut in non-entitlement federal spending in effect since March 1, Americans might wonder whether the spending limits, known as the sequester, are jeopardizing their safety when it comes to the risks of nuclear power plants, federal inmates, and other dangers that the federal government is responsible for warding off.

One month in, it appears to be a mixed picture – in some agencies, there doesn’t appear to be any increase in risk right now. But in others – such as the federal courts – there may be.

Here is a look at the spending cuts’ effects on just a few federal departments and agencies that deal with issues of public safety.

Trucks and buses
Let’s start with the safety of the highways on which you drive to work or visit your family. An unsafe big rig or bus could prematurely end your journey. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which has 1,100 employees and is part of the Department of Transportation, has the job of making sure that large trucks and buses operate safely.

Just last week, for example, the FMCSA ordered Boston-based Fung Wah Bus Transportation, to cease all passenger operations. According to the agency, Fung Wah failed to repair its vehicles, falsified inspection records and failed to ensure its drivers were qualified and complied with hours-of-service regulations.

Department of Transportation spokesman Justin Nisly said that FMCSA is primarily funded by the Highway Trust Fund, which collects its money from taxes on gasoline and other fuels, so only about $1 million of the agency’s $570 million budget is subject to sequestration. 

The FMCSA, he said, is “confident that normal workflow of services, functions and daily activities will not be disrupted. FMCSA continues to work aggressively to keep unsafe companies, vehicles and drivers off the road.”

No FMCSA employees will be furloughed because of the sequester and the FMCSA has not implemented a hiring freeze.

The lesson here is that agencies such as FMCSA which are not funded by annual congressional appropriations but have other sources of funding will carry on despite the sequester. Another example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is funded through the earnings of the Federal Reserve and not subject to congressional appropriations.

Nuclear power plants
The 3,800 employees of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are the ones who inspect America’s nuclear power plants and ensure they pose no threat to the surrounding communities. The nuclear regulator is managing to keep doing its job and will even be hiring new employees, despite the spending cuts. There are 103 licensed nuclear power reactors at 64 sites in the United States.

“NRC safety and security inspections of licensed facilities are not impacted by the FY 2013 planned budget reductions,” said Holly Harrington, a senior adviser at the NRC’s Office of Public Affairs. “The NRC will continue to accomplish its core safety and security mission for all existing licensees as its highest priority. This includes reactors, materials users, fuel facilities, uranium recovery operations and waste facility licensees.”

NRC Executive Director for Operations Bill Borchardt told the NRC’s March 13 Regulatory Information Conference that a 5 percent spending cut had gone into effect on March 1, resulting in a reduction of $52 million in the NRC’s funding for the rest of FY 2013. He said the effects of the cuts will include elimination of an NRC program that gives grants to universities and minority-serving institutions, reductions in several NRC long-term research activities, and delays in staff training. 

But the agency will “be able to continue its safety and security mission for existing licensees, including new reactor and fuel-cycle facility construction activities.”

He said, “We do not plan on initiating any employee furlough actions due to the sequestration.” NRC staffing peaked in 2011 with just over 4,000 employees, he said, and the agency began this year with about 3,800. “Even with the tight fiscal constraints, just to make up for attrition, we expect to hire approximately 2,200 new employees,” Borchardt said. 

Harrington said that as part of its strategy for mitigating the impacts of the reduced budget, the NRC will ask Congress if it can “reprogram” funds, allowing it to use $38 million in unobligated prior-year funds for FY 2013 purposes.  The $38 million in funds “were recovered from completed contracts issued in previous years.”

Another lesson here for sequester budgeting: some agencies have unexpended money in their accounts and can better weather the sequester than agencies which don’t.

Courts and prisoners
In a March 22 letter to Justice Department employees, which was obtained by NBC News, Attorney General Eric Holder said that despite the $1.6 billion spending cut imposed on the bureau, “our actions must not threaten the life and safety-related operations of the department.”

Holder said he was using his authority to transfer funds so he could provide $150 million to the Bureau of Prisons to avoid furloughs of workers at the 119 federal prison facilities around the country. If he had not done this, Holder said, “We faced the need to furlough 3,570 staff each day from the federal prisons around the country.”

Meanwhile in the federal courts, federal appeals court Judge Julia Gibbons, chair of the budget committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, told a House subcommittee on March 20 that “sequestration will impact public safety because there will be fewer probation officers to supervise criminal offenders released in our communities, and funding for drug testing and mental health treatment will be cut 20 percent.”

She said there will be a 30 percent cut in funding for court security equipment and security officers will be required to work reduced hours “thus creating security vulnerabilities throughout the federal court system.”

Around the country federal trial courts have begun not scheduling criminal trials and hearings on Fridays.

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 2, 2013 3:31 PM EDT

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned Tuesday that the budget cuts resulting from sequestration will mean long security lines at the nation’s main points of entry. 

“We will do everything we can do to mitigate those effects,” she told city officials gathered at the National League of Cities Conference in Washington. “But, as mayors you can appreciate there's only so much blood you can squeeze out of a turnip.  And our turnip is pretty dry” 

Napolitano said that the budget-related delays are not necessarily evident now because of the gradual implementation of the cuts and because it is “one of the lighter travel periods of the year.” 

But she cautioned that the furloughing of security employees will eventually mean “significantly longer lines” for travelers as the busier spring and summer season gets underway. 

“Threats from terrorism and other threats that we face at our borders don't go away just because we have a budget crisis,” she said.

Napolitano said yesterday at an address to the Jewish Council for Public Affairs that travelers later this year should budget extra time at security checkpoints due to the sequester. 

"I just tell my friends to just plan on spending some time, and make sure you’ve got lots of things to entertain the kids with," she said. "The lines will be very, very long.”

This story was originally published on Tue Mar 12, 2013 10:31 AM EDT

President Barack Obama is getting some surprising kudos from a group of unlikely lawmakers … Republican senators.

As part of a recent outreach effort from the White House, the president is making phone calls to some senators from across the aisle as they craft a new budget for the coming fiscal year.

“The important thing is that for the first time in a very long time the president appears to be doing some outreach to both Republicans and Democrats -- and that’s long overdue,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, who said Obama had called her on Monday.

What appears a renewed possibility as a result of the president’s outreach is the kind of tradeoff that Obama and House Speaker John Boehner discussed back in 2011: Republicans would agree to increases in tax revenue -- as a result of reform of the tax code -- in return for Democrats accepting changes and potential cost savings in entitlement programs such as Medicare.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who also chatted on the phone with the president, said, “What I see from the president is incredibly encouraging. I think there's a consensus building that without entitlement reform we're going to become Greece, and I think to get our Democratic friends to move on entitlements, we're going to have to move on revenue by flattening the tax code, eliminating deductions and preserving some of that money for the debt.”

“I got a call over the weekend,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told reporters Tuesday.

He wouldn’t discuss the details of his conversation with Obama, but when asked whether he favored a tax reform bill that raised new revenue by eliminating tax breaks, or wanted one that was revenue neutral, Portman said, “I would like to see tax reform because I think it will help the economy and there are very few things we can do around this place that’s going to give the economy a bigger shot in the arm.”

But he added cautiously, “If revenue is diverted from tax reform into deficit savings, it takes away some of the economic benefit of tax reform.”

Obama’s effort comes as the focus on Capitol Hill has quickly shifted from the spending cuts known as “the sequester” to negotiations over a budget plan for the new fiscal year which begins on Oct. 1.

Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., will unveil, probably next week, a budget resolution that will set revenue and spending targets for the coming fiscal year.

The order of the day for Democrats is: find more revenue. The target of Murray and some other Democrats: provisions in the tax code that benefit specific groups -- known as “tax expenditures.”

Economists say that these tax preferences, which include the tax-free status of employer-provided health insurance, are in effect a form of federal spending going to favored groups.

At a hearing of Murray’s committee Tuesday, one Democratic witness, economist Jared Bernstein, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden, said, “If you believe we have a spending problem, you should also believe we have a tax expenditure problem.”

But committee ranking Republican, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said eliminating a tax expenditure “is a tax increase. You can’t spin it any other way.”

Using a process called budget reconciliation, Democrats could pass tax increases with only 51 votes. But prior to that, there would need to be an accord with House Republicans on a joint budget resolution -- something that right now seems a remote possibility.

Obama's renewed focus on Senate Republicans seems to imply that he sees little to be gained at this moment from further attempts to bargain with Boehner.

Yet to be seen: how Murray’s budget resolution interacts with the efforts of the Senate Finance Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to pass comprehensive tax reform.

Baucus thinks the budget reconciliation process is not the preferred path to comprehensive tax reform. Under Senate rules, the budget reconciliation process is very constricting: it requires every revenue provision to have a score (how much revenue it raises or loses) and some tax code simplification ideas are not score-able.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who serves on both the Finance Committee and the Budget Committee, said: “The question is: where you start from … There will be some who’ll say let’s have new taxes, a carbon tax … There will be others who will argue that cutting (tax) rates is going to raise more revenue. But you’ve got to start somewhere.”

NBC News Political Reporter Kasie Hunt contributed to this report.

This story was originally published on Tue Mar 5, 2013 6:26 PM EST

In the raucous debate over the cuts in federal spending, also known as the sequester, which began taking effect Friday, a lot of numbers are being tossed around -- $85 billion, $42 billion, $1.2 trillion. And lots of adjectives, too -- “massive,” “deep,” “severe,” “arbitrary” and more.

You’d think that numbers would be more precise than adjectives, but there’s no agreement on the correct number to describe the size of the spending cuts required by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The Congressional Budget Office explained last week that while the often-used figure of $85 billion “represents the reduction in budgetary resources available to government agencies this year” – the cash that would be on hand for agencies to spend -- in fact “not all of that money would have been spent in this fiscal year.”

Why is that?

Federal departments and agencies would have used some of that $85 billion to “enter into contracts to buy goods or services to be provided and paid for next year or in subsequent years,” the CBO said.

For instance, if the Navy is buying some submarines or if the Missile Defense Agency is buying new satellites, it may take them a few years to spend the money to do so.

Thus, since not all of the $85 billion would have been spent anyway in the current fiscal year, the CBO said that in fact $42 billion will be the actual size of the cut in outlays in the fiscal year which ends on Sept. 30.

And how large is $42 billion when compared to the total amount of federal outlays?

The federal government’s outlays this fiscal year will total $3.55 trillion, according to the CBO’s latest estimate. Do the arithmetic and you’ll see that $42 billion is 1.16 percent of what the federal government would have spent this year if there had there been no sequester.

A 1.16 percent cut does not seem “massive.”

But the cuts do not apply equally across the board to every single category of federal spending – even though the term “across the board” is often used to describe the cuts.

In reality, the Budget Control Act was designed to shield much federal spending from the spending cuts.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

The White House is seen through a chain-link fence where the inaugural reviewing stand once stood, Monday, March 4, 2013, in Washington, as the tear down on Pennsylvania Avenue from the inaugural neared completion.

What’s exempt is most mandatory spending -- the spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security for the old and the disabled, Medicaid and SNAP payments (“food stamps”) for the poor,  payments to low-income people in the form of tax credits, interest payments on the debt, federal employee retirement benefits, and other categories.

(The sequester does cut Medicare’s payments to hospitals, physicians, and the administrators of certain Medicare services by two percent.)

Since mandatory spending, which accounts for two-thirds of all federal spending, is mostly off limits, the spending cuts are highly concentrated on the remaining third of the budget, what’s called “discretionary spending” – the kind of spending that Congress would normally decide each year in its appropriations bills, sometimes increasing the amount spent on some items and perhaps lowering the amounts spent on others.

An example of discretionary spending: the money that goes to the National Science Foundation, which has an annual budget of about $7 billion and funds research in everything from the stickiness of spider webs to the demise of coral reefs in the Florida Keys.

In percentage terms, the CBO said, the amount available to spend for defense (other than for military personnel) will be cut by about 8 percent and the amount available for nondefense discretionary items will be cut by about 6 percent.

The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget has a higher estimate: a reduction in available money of 13 percent for defense programs and 9 percent for nondefense programs for the remaining seven months of this fiscal year.

Defense spending accounted last year for about 18 percent of all federal spending. Under the sequester, defense spending will bear a disproportionately large share of the cuts. And since the law gave President Obama the discretion to exempt military service members’ pay from the cuts (and he did so) the defense cuts will fall heavily on daily operations and maintenance, activities such as training missions for Navy aviators.

Finally, what about that other number that Obama used in his State of the Union address: “about a trillion dollars’ worth of budget cuts”?

Obama was referring to the full 10-year budget forecasting period and assuming that the Budget Control Act will remain in effect for the entire period.

If the automatic spending cut provisions were to remain in effect, they would reduce deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over the 10-year period from 2012 to 2021, the CBO has estimated. Total federal outlays over the next ten years will amount to $45 trillion.

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 4, 2013 10:37 AM EST

TODAY: President Obama signed an order allowing deep automatic budget cuts to become law, as he and House Speaker John Boehner pass the blame for doing nothing to stop the measures. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.

NIGHTLY NEWS:CNBC's John Harwood joins Lester Holt for more on the sequester. 

MORNING JOE: Top Talkers: As expected, the $85B in spending cuts kicked in on Friday, March 1, 2013. The totality of the impact will be felt slowly, and several members of both sides of the aisle are discussing the cuts and what they mean for the country. The Morning Joe panel -- including Mike Barnicle and former senior advisor for the McCain–Palin campaign Nicolle Wallace -- discusses.

It’s Friday, March 1, and that means the federal government has crossed the much-hyped and dreaded deadline for the fiscal reductions known as the “sequester.”

The members of Congress who for voted for the Budget Control Act – and the budget cuts contained within – and President Barack Obama who signed it into law on Aug. 2, 2011, may not have believed the day would arrive, but now it has.

But today is only the beginning of the beginning.

For one thing, Obama must sign an order formally starting the “sequester” or spending reductions, which according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, would amount to $42 billion in the current fiscal year.

And White House aides have indicated that the president is not likely to put pen to paper on that order until after he meets with congressional leaders, a meeting slated for Friday morning.

Once Obama signs the order to start the spending cuts, any furloughs of federal workers could not begin at least for another 30 days due to federal regulations and to collective bargaining agreements which the government has with the unions that represent roughly half of the federal workforce.

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House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaks during a news conference Feb. 28, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington.

So the Border Patrol Agents in Arizona won’t suddenly vanish on Friday and the civilians who repair Navy ships won’t be ordered to immediately put down their tools.

As with many things the federal government does, there are multiple rules, regulatory hurdles, avenues for appeal and opportunities for litigation.

As Under Secretary of Defense Robert Hale, the Pentagon’s Chief Financial Officer, explained last week, “The bottom line is, furloughs would not actually start for DOD employees until late April.”

He explained, “There's a whole series of notifications. We started the first one today (Feb. 20), with the notification to Congress, along with a message by the secretary of defense to our civilian employees. That starts a 45-day clock ticking. Until that clock has run out, we cannot proceed with furloughs.”

He added, “At some point in mid-March, we will send a notification to each employee who may be furloughed. That starts a 30-day clock, waiting period, before we can take any action. And then later on in April, we will send a decision to employees, and they have a one-week period, once we've made that decision, to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.”  

The Merit Systems Protection Board is the independent agency which hears and decides complaints when a federal employee claims that he or she has been the victim of an unfair, punitive, or discriminatory personnel action. The board issued 7,585 decisions last year.

Related: Budget cuts likely to be felt on Main Street

In a memo sent Wednesday to Cabinet officers and the heads of federal agencies, Danny Werfel, the controller of the Office of Management and Budget, emphasized that agency heads “must allow employees’ exclusive representatives” – their unions – “to have pre-decisional involvement” in planned furloughs or other personnel actions “to the fullest extent practicable” and must bargain with the unions over the impact of furloughs. The head of each department or agency must comply with “any and all collective bargaining requirements.”

In his memo, Werfel did not flatly warn federal agency heads to not hire any new personnel, but he did say they should give “increased scrutiny” to hiring any new workers, as well to the money they spend on training programs, conferences, and travel.

Like Hale at the Pentagon, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano emphasized in her briefing for reporters this week that the effects of the spending cuts – while they will be substantial – won’t be instantaneous.

“The impacts people are going to see – and they will build over the next several weeks; you won’t see them immediately like a shutdown, but it will accrue over the next few weeks,” she said. “Lines, procedures, wait times (at U.S. ports of entry and airports) are all going to get longer.”

She added, “It won’t be like a (government) shutdown, where it’s like turning off the light switch. But all I can say for folks is these are the effects that will accrue. Please don’t yell at the customs officer or the TSO (transportation security officer) officer because the lines are long. The lines over the next few weeks are going to start to lengthen in some dramatic ways in parts of the country.”

Just as the personnel decisions will take weeks to ripple their way through the federal workforce, so too will decisions on contracts for new ships, drones, and electronic gadgets.

“I don't anticipate that we will cancel many, if any contracts, because we'd incur substantial costs,” Hale told reporters last week.

He said that due to the spending cuts, the Pentagon might delay entering into new contracts, “but I wouldn't expect that we will terminate existing contracts.”

Seeking to reassure contractors, Hale said, “If you've got a contract with us, we're going to pay you ... . Even under sequestration and furloughs, we will find a time to keep our payments to our employers and the vendors on time.”

The slow grinding of the bureaucratic wheels does not mean that furloughs won’t hurt, if they occur.

A fact sheet issued by the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union which representing 650,000 federal and D.C. government workers, spells out some of the possible pain:

•Up to 22 days out of work with no pay, equivalent to a 20 percent pay cut;

•Reduced contribution to workers’ retirement savings accounts;

•Reduced take-home pay due to the deduction of health insurance benefits at the full salary rate.

But as a recent report from the Congressional Research Service pointed out, the sequestration procedures provide for exemptions for many groups.

Among the categories which the law spares from the spending cuts are:

•Social Security benefits

•The Medicaid health insurance program for low-income people

•Payments to individuals in the form of refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage workers and the tax credits under the 2010 health care law to help people buy health insurance.

•Retirement benefits paid to retired federal workers

•Child Nutrition Programs, including the School Lunch and School Breakfast programs,

•The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called “food stamps”

•Pell Grants for college students

•Unobligated cash balances, carried over from prior years, for nondefense programs

•Pay for military personnel.

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 1, 2013 12:00 AM EST

With less than 36 hours to go until the much-discussed 'sequestration' deadline, the Senate blocked a pair of competing bills to prevent the broad, automatic cuts from taking effect.

Neither measure was expected to reach the 60-vote threshold required to move a fix forward, with Republicans and Democrats taking up the legislation largely for show the day before the cuts are slated to kick in. 

The Republican sequester ‘replacement’ proposal -- which would have offered the administration more authority to allocate the spending cuts -- was killed with a vote of 38 to 62. The White House had threatened to veto that bill in the unlikely event that it passed.

A Democratic plan focused on closing tax loopholes and raising some taxes garnered 51 votes, short of the 60 necessary to move it forward. 

With both sides still deadlocked over how to address the deficit, congressional leaders will meet with the president at the White House tomorrow. 

President Barack Obama lambasted Senate Republicans in a statement, saying that GOP opposition to the Democrats' bill stood in the way of a solution. 

"Even though a majority of Senators support [the Democrats'] approach, Republicans have refused to allow it an up-or-down vote - threatening our economy with a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts that will cost us jobs and slow our recovery," he said.

"Instead of closing a single tax loophole that benefits the well-off and well-connected, they chose to cut vital services for children, seniors, our men and women in uniform and their families," the statement read. "They voted to let the entire burden of deficit reduction fall squarely on the middle class."
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Earlier Thursday, competing press conferences, lawmakers from both parties continued to lay blame at each other's feet as they acknowledged that the across-the-board reductions to the nation's military and domestic spending programs are inevitable.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid olds a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on the eve of the budget sequester Feb. 28, 2013 in Washington, DC.

House Speaker John Boehner argued Thursday that the budget ball remains in Democrats' court, a case he says he will make again tomorrow in the meeting with Obama.

"My message at the White House will be the same that I'm telling you today,” he said. “It's time for them to do their job and to pass a bill."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded that Republican calls for Democratic action "take a lot of pizzazz."

"They've done nothing," Reid said, saying that House Republicans are hiding behind the lower chamber's now-expired passage of budget measures last year while failing to allow compromise legislation to come up for a vote.

The weariness over the sequester jockeying – which promises to drag on for weeks as the fight shifts to future deadlines for greenlighting federal funding -- even spilled over into the Senate chaplain’s opening prayer this morning.

Mentioning the cuts in his invocation, Senate Chaplain Rev. Barry Black prayed "Rise up, oh God, and save us from ourselves."

NBC's Mike Viqueira contributed to this report. 

This story was originally published on Thu Feb 28, 2013 1:41 PM EST