United States

“Sequester” cuts, the Benghazi furor, and Susan Rice on the hot seat

The budget compromise reached in January delayed for two months the automatic cuts on military and social spending that had been mandated by Congress in July 2012 if Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on an alternative approach to deficit reduction. When the new March 31, 2013, deadline passed without an agreement, the initial round of these so-called “sequester” cuts went into effect. The first high-profile consequence of the cuts, significant delays in air travel resulting from mandatory furloughs for air-traffic controllers, was quickly addressed by Congress authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift funds from facility improvement to salaries. As the spring progressed, however, officials of more and more federally funded programs and agencies bemoaned the reductions to the services they provided that resulted from the sequester cuts.

Obama’s efforts to move forward with his second-term agenda were compromised by a number of controversies in which the administration was embroiled. Republican criticism of the government’s role in the Benghazi attacks had been ongoing, but it escalated in May, when assertions of mismanagement and unpreparedness were compounded by renewed accusations of a cover-up, which many Republicans saw reflected in a recently released e-mail exchange between officials of the State Department and the CIA that had preceded UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s appearance on television news programs a few days after the attacks. Characterizing the e-mail string as a dialogue grounded not in politics but in an effort to convey the changing understanding of events that had occurred just a few days previously, the administration dismissed the Republican allegations as politically motivated.