President Obama spoke to employees at Newport News Shipbuilding about the impact on jobs, the economy, and citizens of sequestration budget cuts. He criticized some Republicans in Congress for not being willing to “compromise an inch” to avoid the automatic spending cuts.
“Sequestration,” a legal procedure in which every federal agency has the same percentage of its budget cut in order to take back deficit spending, was agreed to in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and scheduled to happen on March 1, 2013.