President’s spending needs to be limited

According to President 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. The White House says it must now cut across the board regardless of how important a given PPA is.

Not so fast! PPAs 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 the distinction between PPAs and accounts is huge. Congress may have intended for the sequester to apply to PPAs but they wrote a sloppy 11th hour law.

Republicans in Congress were prepared to give President Obama more spending flexibility than he already has. I don’t know why because he has the legal ability to take the cuts from which of the PPAs or the 1,200 budget accounts he chose.

Crying wolf and trying to spread fear was a series of contemptible prevarications by President Obama and his staff.

Gerald W. Ray, Spokane