Under statutory mandates, Congress is required to impose automatic budget cuts if an agreement on “debt reduction” is not reached. It is already clear Congress is ignoring its own self-imposed requirements, which Americans overwhelmingly support. As I recently wrote: “Essentially, Congress mandated action on cutting spending by force of law, and then ignored their own legislative mandates. A more illustrative example of lawlessness is hard to find.” Well, I may have found it:
Military planners are under strict orders not to devise scenarios for meeting the demands of “sequestration,” as the automatic, across-the-board spending reductions are called. Such paperwork, if leaked, would tell Congress there might be a way to deal with such drastic cuts.
…“They said they had all been ordered not to. It would be a violation. It would be a crime,” one participant told The Times.
An Army officer said, according to the participant: “I would be disobeying orders. I would be violating my orders and essentially committing a criminal act if I did any analytics on sequestration at this point.”
Remember, this is not about slashing budgets, but rather about a decision to slow the rate of growth in defense spending.