With hearings on the FY 2013 budget in full swing on Capitol Hill, one question keeps popping up: “How are you planning for sequestration?” The answer was too often, “We’re not.” Considering it was barely six months ago that Congress passed and the President signed this legislative trigger to rein in the deficit with automatic cuts, the collective amnesia among government leaders is unacceptable.

In the Congressional corner, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) sent out signals that defense cuts won’t be in his budget resolution set to hit the streets next week. House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) is shopping around a bill that would offset the sequester’s first year of defense cuts with government workforce reductions.

In his appearance before the Senate last month to discuss funding for the agency that consumes roughly two-thirds of the discretionary budget, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he refused to plan for sequestration. Panetta dismissed sequestration, which would require the Department of Defense (DOD) to lower its spending trajectory by more than $500 billion over the next decade, as a “crazy process.”

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) chief Tom D’Agostino also answered questions about sequestration plans from the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee in the negative, saying the agency’s FY 2013 budget request complied with sequestration levels. That wouldn’t get them off the hook anyway: Nuclear weapons advocates like Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH) are already trying to roll back the modest savings in NNSA’s request by requiring full funding for unnecessary programs like the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement building at Los Alamos laboratory (which is currently on hold).

How can the agencies that comprise the biggest budgetary account in the federal government dismiss the law of the land so casually—particularly when their boss, President Obama, has threatened to veto any attempts to skirt it? Defense Department accountants have blamed their failure to plan on the fact that the BCA is based on an old statute. DOD Comptroller Robert Hale recently told lawmakers that Pentagon lawyers must figure out how much control the BCA gives them over how and where to cut before they can construct a plan.

Let’s review what’s on the books. When this very Congress passed the Budget Control Act last summer, they created a “Super Committee” of lawmakers tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade. If the committee failed to find those cuts, a trigger mechanism known as “sequestration” would kick in, slicing the $1.2 trillion off the top line for federal agencies. It’s true that the details of how those cuts would be imposed are murky: The sequestration process was created in the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, which was basically ignored by Congress and the President.

But the BCA has put a brighter spotlight on Congress and the Administration and their need to act on the deficit. The message that every part of the budget must feel some pain comes through clearly. It’s true that sequestration was not designed to become law, but it was designed to force Congress to produce a serious budget reduction plan—something we have yet to see. Lawmakers need to craft a serious plan that employs both spending reductions from across government with new revenues. Until then, agency heads must still plan for the sequestration scenario by taking a hard look at their budgets to separate the needs from the wants. Because guess what: Even if Congress does sidestep sequestration, these cuts are going to have to come anyway. The numbers on America’s budget ledger simply don’t add up to any other outcome.

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TCS Quote of the Week

“It’s a simple problem of money. The Highway Trust Fund is broke and we’re trying to figure ways to deal with that but unfortunately we seem to be piddling around the edges rather than dealing with the root cause.” — Sen. John Cornyn speaking about ‘MAP-21,’ the Senate’s highway bill (Politico)