As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the east coast, Breitbart.com is reporting that President Obama's "proposal for the upcoming budget sequester would cut nearly $900 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including disaster relief, food and shelter, and flood management at both the federal and state levels." This is absolutely false: the report they characterize as the White House's "sequester proposal" is actually a legally required estimate of how scheduled automatic budget cuts will impact discretionary spending, and inveighs strongly against allowing those cuts to take effect.
The debt-limit deal passed in 2011 (with the support of over two-thirds of House Republicans, including GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan) required both parties to find a way to cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion, or face steep, automatic cuts across the board starting in January 2013 -- the sequester. On August 7, President Obama signed into law the Sequester Transparency Act, which required the White House to "submit to Congress a detailed report on the sequestration" that provides "an estimate for each category of the sequestration percentages and amounts necessary to achieve the required reduction."
The White House Office of Management and Budget released that report in September. Contrary to Breitbart.com's misreading, the report does not propose cuts to FEMA or any other agency but rather enumerates the cuts that are required by the statute. The introduction to the report makes this clear (emphasis added):
The percentage cuts in this report, and the identification of exempt and non-exempt accounts, reflect the requirements of the laws that the Administration is applying. With the single exception of military personnel accounts, the Administration cannot choose which programs to exempt, or what percentage cuts to apply. These matters are dictated by a detailed statutory scheme. The Administration does not support these cuts, but unless Congress acts responsibly, there will be no choice but to implement them.
So no, the White House is not "propos[ing]" FEMA cuts through the sequester. And that should come as a relief to FEMA, given the many enthusiastic calls for cutting its budget it's seen coming from Republicans lately
