New GAO Report Exposes [over $100B in] More Duplication & Overlap in the Federal Government

This should help Obama find the cuts needed for sequestration, since sequestration does not specify where the cuts are to be made.

By law, sequestration requires equal percentage cuts to every “project, program, or activity.”

In reality, sequestration requires across the board equal cuts. [usnews.com]

within each activity there is no requirement as to what is cut...i am sure ICE and DHS can find places to make cuts OTHER than releasing inmates and prisoners, like Iraq's Saddam did, to maximize chaos and pain.

Bear in mind, these are NOT EVEN REAL CUTS, they are REDUCTIONS IN THE INCREASES, so they will STILL have more money than they did last year, just not as much more as the automatic increases under the farce that is "baseline budgeting" call for.

In reality, sequestration requires across the board equal cuts. [usnews.com]

But if any of these cataclysms do come to pass, then they will be mostly Mr. Obama's own creation. The truth is that the sequester already gives the White House the legal flexibility to avoid doom, if a 5% cut to programs that have increased more than 17% on average over the Obama Presidency counts as doom.

According to Mr. Obama and his budget office, the sequester cuts are indiscriminate and spell out specific percentages that will be subtracted from federal "projects, programs and activities," or PPAs. Except for the exemptions in the 2011 budget deal, the White House says it must now cut across the board regardless of how important a given PPA is. Food inspectors, say, will be treated the same as subsidies for millionaire farmers.

Not so fast. Programs, projects and activities are a technical category of the federal budget, but the sequester actually occurs at the roughly 1,200 broader units known as budget accounts. Some accounts are small, but others contain hundreds of PPAs and the larger accounts run to billions of dollars. For the Pentagon in particular, the distinction between PPAs and accounts is huge. This means in most cases the President has the room to protect his "investments" while managing the fiscal transition over time.

Congress might have intended for the sequester to apply to PPAs, but they also wrote a sloppy law at the 11th hour. The Budget Control Act of 2011 disinterred the lapsed sequester rules of the Gramm-Rudman Deficit Control Act of 1985, though without anyone looking at the details.

Gramm-Rudman said the sequester applies to accounts, not PPAs, under a temporary "part-year" budget. As it happens the government is operating under just such a continuing resolution now, not a normal appropriations bill. If Congress returned to regular order in 2014 or later, the sequester would indeed trickle down to PPAs.

The White House has even more discretion than this. When Gramm-Rudman led to a 4.3% sequester in 1986, Congress passed a special bill that created the category of PPAs and spent 1,119 pages defining what they were for 1986. Congress has never done anything of the sort since, and thus as the government has grown PPA definitions now vary among Cabinet departments and sometimes even account to account in the same department.

Lacking legislation, the White House assigns these amorphous units in its annual budget. Even if the lawyers insisted the sequester must apply to "PPAs" per se, the budgeteers could formally construe PPAs in ways that preserve a work-around.

This White House has never been fussy when a statutory text or even the Constitution interferes with its political ambitions. (See ObamaCare, immigration executive orders, recess appointments and much else.) Could it be that Mr. Obama is exaggerating the legal stringency of the sequester in a gambit to force Congress to shut it off?

Washington Monument Syndrome [wikipedia.org]

The Washington Monument syndrome, also known as the Mount Rushmore Syndrome,[1] or the firemen first principle,[2][3] is a political tactic used in the United States by government agencies when faced with budget cuts. The tactic entails cutting the most visible or appreciated service provided by the government, from popular services such as national parks and libraries[1] to valued public employees such as teachers and firefighters.[2] The name derives from the National Park Service's alleged habit of saying that any cuts would lead to an immediate closure of the wildly popular Washington Monument.[4] Critics compare the tactic to hostage taking or blackmail.[5]

They can make other cuts but are shafting the public (or saying they'll do so) merely as a political ploy.

Washington Monument Syndrome [wikipedia.org]

[Judge] Napolitano explained that the sequester is not a reduction in spending, but actually just slowing down the rate of spending increases. He said Obama has an obligation to keep the most critical areas of the government running at full force, and look to apply the cuts elsewhere.

“This is almost an impeachable offense. If the president is deciding how to spend money in order to hurt us, rather than in order to provide us with the services for which we have paid and for which we have hired him, he is doing the opposite of what he has taken an oath to do,” Napolitano said.

That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.

Critics compare the tactic to hostage taking or blackmail.[5]

Even Bob Woodward, the godfather of mainstream journalism, is voicing concerns calling Obama's actions "Madness"
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/...dness.html

Good ! I for one am glad the public is starting to see the corrupt, third world, tyrannical, imperial tendencies of this corrupt administration.

a GAO report exposes over $100 billion in duplicative federal programs

http://www.coburn.senate.gov/publ...0468762340

This should help Obama find the cuts needed for sequestration, since sequestration does not specify where the cuts are to be made.

Maybe now this administration can make use of the sequestration to eliminate this waste, instead of threatening grounding air travel, shutting down air traffic control, shutting down food processing plants, and the other myriad scare mongering tactics they have been up to, and purposefully cutting areas that maximize pain and inconvenience to the public, endanger innocent citizens (such as by releasing immigration prisoners under the ruse of budget cuts [washingtontimes.com]) etc

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House is threatening a presidential veto of a Senate Republican measure that would give President Barack Obama more authority and flexibility to find $85 billion in spending cuts this year. The measure is intended to replace the automatic across-the-board cuts scheduled to kick in Friday.