The Senate on Wednesday evening gave final approval to legislation demanding that the White House provide details on how the Obama administration would mete out across-the-board spending cuts to defense and domestic programs scheduled for next year. The vote sends the measure to President Obama for his signature.
The White House had opposed the legislation, believing the shroud of uncertainty about the automatic cuts, called sequestration, increased the chances that Congress would reach a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal before the end of the year that would cancel the cuts. Officials from the White House budget office feared that detailing the cuts would spook lawmakers from both parties, persuading them to simply abrogate the deficit-reduction deal that is forcing the cuts.
The details could also hurt the president politically. Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, has been slamming Mr. Obama for doing noth ing to head off $500 billion in automatic defense cuts over 10 years that amount to 10 percent of the military budget next year.
Now Mr. Obama must decide whether to sign the bill and produce the details within 30 days of enactment or veto it and risk an embarrassing override. The House passed the Sequestration Transparency Act last week 414-2. It passed the Senate by voice vote, to bipartisan applause.
“Everyone should understand that sequestration is a terrible way to cut spending, so I am hopeful that the more information my colleagues receive about its impact, the more they will be willing to move off their partisan positions and work with us toward a balanced and bipartisan replacement,†said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who drafted similar legislation with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.
“The president owes it to our forces around the world and to their families to put a plan on the tabl e for all to see now, rather than waiting until after the November elections pass,†Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said last week.
Last year's Budget Control Act, the hard-fought deficit reduction law that allowed the nation's borrowing limit to rise, set up a bipartisan committee tasked to agree on at least a trillion dollars in deficit reduction. If it failed, automatic cuts, split between defense and nondefense programs, would kick in. It did fail, but in recent weeks, Republicans have ratcheted up demands that the defense side of the cuts be canceled. Democrats have said they are willing to go along only if Republicans agree to increase revenues to the government and not just roll all the cuts onto domestic programs.
White House officials did not immediately say whether the president intended to sign the bill.
