Exactly what is the sequester

Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits are exempt from sequestration. In addition to potential layoffs and furloughs, individual agencies will begin announcing and implementing other cost-saving measures.

Federal funding for the current fiscal year expires on March 27, Unless Congress authorizes additional funding, a partial government shutdown would result.

Learn More About sequester. Time Traveler for sequester The first known use of sequester was in the 14th century See more words from the same century. Listen to Our Podcast About sequester. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of sequester.

Medical Definition of sequester Entry 1 of 2. Medical Definition of sequester Entry 2 of 2. Legal Definition of sequester Entry 1 of 2. Legal Definition of sequester Entry 2 of 2. History and Etymology for sequester Transitive verb Anglo-French sequestrer , from Middle French, from Latin sequestrare to hand over to a trustee, from sequester third party to whom disputed property is entrusted, agent, from secus beside, otherwise.

President Obama and congressional Republicans have each proposed their own ideas to avert the sequester, but the two sides haven't agreed yet. At this point, the sequester is all but assured to go into effect.

Obama will meet with congressional leaders Friday morning, but negotiations haven't exactly been substantive thus far. Given the sequester's all-around unpalatability, the likeliest scenario appears to be a short-term fix after the sequester kicks in for a few weeks. President Obama and his GOP counterparts, distant as they are on matters of fiscal policy, have a few remaining options to keep the sequester from wreaking its oft-alleged, oft-doubted chaos:.

Given how little sides have been talking over the last few weeks, it's almost completely impossible that such a grand deal will get struck before p. So why not give federal agencies broader authority to rearrange their money and shrink overall spending while maintaining the most vital programs and services? Republicans have reportedly fought over this, and President Obama has resisted the idea of leaving the sequester in place, even with more leeway to make the cuts less painful.

Giving agencies more flexibility poses two problems. First, it fundamentally changes the sequester by making it more palatable. When Congress and Obama agreed on it in , the sequester was designed as a punishment for failing to reach a broadly acceptable deficit deal. If the cuts aren't so bad, the intent of forcing a deal will be abandoned.

Second, it cedes power to the Obama administration, which members of Congress don't like. As Sen. John McCain put it in a recent interview, Senate appropriators spent many hours juggling the funds for Defense programs—why simply let Obama undo their work?

One useful intellectual exercise is to assume that our political system is smarter than individual politicians or parties. Call it the wisdom of crowds, or the Efficient Government Hypothesis.

The idea is that the outcomes our system produces are better than the positions of those who seek to influence the outcomes. So the combination of the sequester and the start of the year Obama tax hikes is telling us something that almost no one in politics today argues: We can afford short-term deficit cuts produced by spending cuts and tax hikes, and we can safely ignore the long-term deficit.

Now keep in mind that this is exactly the opposite of what appears to be the consensus. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is probably the most prominent proponents of the view that the U.

The basic idea is that the economy is so weak that the government needs to run short-term deficits, but the long-term deficit is so scary that it needs to be addressed as soon as possible. The primary dissent from this view comes from Republicans who argue that the U. They say that both long-term deficits and short-term deficits need to be addressed right now. Which means that the actual policy we've adopted — short-term deficit cuts while ignoring long-term deficits — has nearly zero supporters the notable exception being CNBC's Larry Kudlow.

Any decent contrarian should at least ask: Could we have stumbled upon the right approach? The key to this kind of exercise is intellectual humility. Instead of trying to figure out whether the outcome fits with your models about how the economy works, you need to ask what it would take for this to justify this outcome. That's a hard thing for people deeply interested in economics to do because we tend to be deeply wedded to models that we think best explain things.

So what is the Sequester Model? In the first place, it seems to assume that short-term fiscal stimulus is ineffective or counter-productive. This isn't all that radical.