PRESIDENT Barack Obama will not accept action by Congress that “locks in” spending caps enacted in 2011, said White House budget director Shaun Donovan on Thursday, March 12, as Republicans were preparing to release their budget plans.
Lawmakers for both parties have said they want to ease the “sequester” spending constraints, but Republican budget proposals that will likely be unveiled next week are largely expected to adhere to the spending caps “for military and domestic discretionary programs.”
“The President has been very clear. He will not accept a budget that locks in the sequester going forward and he will not accept a budget that severs the vital link between defense and non-defense,” Donovan said at a news conference at the Capitol.
The automatic, across-the-board cuts that were part of a 2011 budget deal and are supposed to run through 2012 shared the pain roughly equally between military and domestic discretionary programs, and barred Congress from diverting funds to one side from the other. Some Republicans have suggested diverting more funds to the military to halt a deterioration in its war budget.
Although the President doesn’t sign the non-binding budget resolution from Congress, he does have the ability to veto spending legislation. Donovan stopped short of saying when the President would veto spending bills that conform to across-the-board spending caps for the fiscal 2016 year. Those would be reviewed as they are written later this year, he said.
The sequestration caps would hold military non-war and domestic dictionary spending at $1.016 trillion, the same level as in 2006.
(With reports from Reuters)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Weekend March 14-17, 2015 Sec. A pg.8)
