Congress passed The Sequestration Transparency Act in July, and President Barack Obama signed it into law on Tuesday.
According to The Hill, the law requires the White House budget office to reveal how the automatic budget cuts required of them will be carried out. Obama essentially signed a law requiring his administration to finally give details about the cuts it has been reluctant to make public.
Under the the deal that raised the debt-ceiling, $109 billion in spending cuts have to be enacted by January and the Obama administration now must issue details about their proposals in 30 days.
The Obama administration has been reluctant to discuss specifics in an election year because sequestration will require $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years and, according to The Hill, half of those cuts would be made to defense spending. Cutting defense spending would hurt Obama politically in states such as Virginia, and it is something about which the White House is more than concerned.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) urged Obama to work with the House to replace the 2013 cuts with reductions to mandatory spending.
“Allowing the sequester to occur would be a failure of leadership and a failure to govern. We must work together to replace these arbitrary cuts,” Ryan said. “I urge the Senate and President Obama to follow our lead in providing an alternative to replace the harmful effects of sequestration.”
Obama has indicated he does not approve of the House measure because it does not raise taxes.
The so-called fiscal cliff refers to the combination of spending cuts and tax increases across the board, if Congress cannot agree to extend the Bush tax cuts during its lame-duck session, that will put the country further into recession.
Democrats, such as Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), have publicly indicated they are willing to take the country over the fiscal cliff for political reasons and let the Bush tax cuts expire across the board, raising taxes on all incomes.
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