The administration has done all in its power to terrify ordinary Americans with its dystopian vision of what the automatic cuts will mean to them, even though the amount being cut only represents 2.5 per cent of the $3.533 trillion federal budget for the fiscal year 2013. Obama has stated that there would be fewer measles vaccinations, fewer federal meat inspectors, "airport security will see cutbacks" meaning longer queues and increased danger, and "federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go." 

His supporters go farther, claiming that disaster relief, Medicare and Medicaid, schools and scientific research will be hit "drastically", that tens of thousands of government employees (especially for some reason firemen) will lose their jobs, that grants for 1.4 million students enrolled in higher education will shrink, and a further 680,000 students enrolled in federal Work-Study programmes will see their wages collapse. Job training programmes are supposedly at stake, "particularly for disadvantaged youth".

With these blatant scare tactics, Obama aims to build up enough fury against the Republicans — whom he hopes will be blamed entirely for the sequester — that his party will win the House in the 2014 mid-term elections, after which power would not be separated but would reside completely with the Democrats. It is in Obama's interests to ensure that the sequester impacts negatively on as many Americans as possible, which is why he has now twice refused Republican offers to switch it from across-the-board cuts to ones that the administration itself chooses. As the National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg has quipped: "If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a high school's Thanksgiving parade."

Yet pursuing this scorched-earth strategy involves political risks for Obama as well as for the Republicans he blames for the sequester, not least because many Americans can't see why 2.5 per cent cuts need to be taken out of frontline services. Some 63 per cent of them approve a 5 per cent across-the-board cut in federal spending anyhow, according to the latest polls. Instead of fretting over where $85 billion might be lost, they wonder instead about the $45 billion that Senator Marco Rubio has identified as sitting in dormant federal accounts, or the $40 billion of the foreign aid budget, or the $77 billion Crop Insurance Programme, or the 55,000 unused or underused federal buildings which, if they were even just given away, would save $17 billion per annum in maintenance costs. Some people have even wondered about the $179,750 an hour it costs to fly the president in Air Force One to political rallies, at which he blames the Republicans for refusing to increase taxes.