Sequestration Amounts Were Never the Real Story: Congress Put the Power of the Purse on Autopilot

If you want to understand what has gone wrong with American government, don't start with the latest poll. Start with a single sentence from Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." That sentence is not a formality. It is the constitutional heart of self-government.

James Madison called the power of the purse "the most complete and effectual weapon" the people's representatives possess. The Framers understood that a government that controls money controls everything. So they placed that power in the hands of the branch closest to the people, Congress, and required elected officials to make explicit, accountable choices about every dollar.

Then came the sequester. And Congress did the one thing the Framers designed that power to prevent. It refused to choose. For more than a decade, the political class has argued about sequestration amounts. How much was cut? Who got hurt? Was it too much or too little? The entire debate misses the point. The amount was never the problem. The problem was the mechanism, a Congress that replaced the power of the purse with an algorithm.

The Number That Wasn't a Cut

Start with the headline figure. The sequester was billed as roughly $1.2 trillion over nine years, about $85 billion in the first year, split between defense and nondefense. In a federal budget that has since crossed $6 trillion a year, the much-hyped first-year reduction came to less than $270 per American. It was not a lion's bite. It was a nibble.

But the more important fact is this: the sequester amount was never a cut from last year's spending. It was a reduction in the planned increase. Washington uses baseline budgeting, which assumes that nearly every program grows automatically every year. If a program was projected to grow by 5 percent and the sequester trims that growth to 3 percent, Congress calls it a "draconian cut." In reality, the program still grew. It simply grew less than the planners wanted.

That is why, in nominal dollars, total federal outlays rose from about $3.5 trillion in fiscal 2013, the first year of the sequester, to more than $6 trillion in fiscal 2023. Government did not shrink. It barely slowed down. The sequester "cuts" were not austerity. They were a smaller-than-expected expansion of an already bloated state.

This is the first lesson of the sequester amounts: when Washington says "cut," translate it to "smaller increase." The baseline is the problem, not the number.

The Formula That Ignores the Constitution

The second problem is worse than the amount. A sequester applies a uniform percentage across eligible programs. That sounds fair in a bureaucratic sense. But it is a constitutional falsehood.

The Constitution does not treat every federal dollar as equally legitimate. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to provide for the common defense. It does not give the federal government a general authority to fund local schools, subsidize favored industries, or maintain hundreds of domestic agencies. Those functions, to the extent they exist at all, belong to the states and the people under the Tenth Amendment.

An across-the-board sequester cuts national defense by the same percentage as the Department of Education. It treats the core function of the federal government, protecting the country, as if it were morally and constitutionally identical to every beltway boondoggle. That is not fiscal discipline. It is a confession that Congress has forgotten what the federal government exists to do.

Friedrich Hayek taught that no central authority can know enough to plan an economy, because the relevant knowledge is scattered among millions of individuals. An across-the-board sequester is the fiscal version of that error. A single percentage cannot know which programs are essential to liberty and which are redundant to it. Madison understood the power of the purse as a tool for making exactly those distinctions, on the record, with accountability. A sequester is the opposite: a rule that replaces judgment with arithmetic.

The truly revealing number is not the $1.2 trillion subject to sequester. It is the tens of trillions in mandatory spending and interest that the sequester exempted. Social Security, Medicaid, and interest on the debt were shielded from the same discipline, and Medicare faced only a limited cap on provider payments. The real drivers of the long-term fiscal problem were put on autopilot while the discretionary accounts Congress actually controls absorbed the pain.

The Seen and the Unseen

Henry Hazlitt taught that a sound economist looks at a policy's effects on all groups over time, not just the visible short-run benefit to one group. Apply that lesson to the sequester.

The seen effect is the specific program reduced: the delayed maintenance at a military base, the smaller grant to a local agency, the furlough of a federal worker. The unseen effects are larger. Every dollar left in the private economy instead of consumed by Washington would have been used to produce goods, services, jobs, and innovation. The government cannot spend money more productively than the people who earned it.

The unseen effect also includes the reforms that never happened. The sequester gave Congress cover to say it had "done something" about deficits, even though the structural drivers of debt were never touched. According to the Congressional Budget Office's own pre-pandemic baseline, deficits were on track to exceed $1 trillion a year even with the sequester fully in place. The appearance of discipline postponed real discipline.

That is the cruel joke of the sequester amounts. They were large enough to make headlines and small enough to avoid responsibility. The political class got to perform austerity while the debt continued to climb.

What Should Replace It

The answer is not a bigger sequester. It is a constitutional budget.

Congress should start by zeroing out every federal function that the Constitution does not authorize. That is not "austerity"; it is fidelity to the text. The Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, and hundreds of other domestic agencies should be eliminated or returned to the states. That would produce real savings far larger than the sequester, and it would restore the proper division of powers.

Second, national defense should be funded at the level its mission requires. Defense is not just another line item. It is the first duty of the federal government. A formula that hacks the Pentagon by the same percentage as a grant program is not fiscal conservatism; it is a category error.

Third, Congress should reclaim the power of the purse. No more supercommittees. No more automatic reductions. No more hiding behind baseline rules. Members of Congress should be forced to vote on specific line items, in public, on the record. If they want to spend money on a program, let them defend it. If they want to cut a program, let them do it by name. That is what Madison's weapon requires.

Americans did not elect an algorithm. They elected representatives to make hard choices. The sequester amount is a symptom of their refusal to do so. The next time someone cites a sequestration figure, ask three questions. Against what baseline? By what constitutional authority? And who chose? If no one can answer, the number is not a policy. It is an excuse. The cure is not a better formula. It is a Congress that remembers what the power of the purse is for, and the voters who hold it to account.