It turns out that the "across the board cuts" of Sequester leave plenty of flexibility for the Obama administration. Within a rather large budget category (in many cases), the feds would be free to prioritize. The devil is in the details, and it turns out that the legislation was somewhat carelessly written. Review & Outlook of the Wall Street Journal pursued the legalities: Programs, projects and activities 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 in particular, the distinction between PPAs and accounts is huge. This means in most cases the President has the room to protect his "investments" while managing the fiscal transition over time. Congress might have intended for the sequester to apply to PPAs, but they also wrote a sloppy law at the 11th...(Read Full Post)