Orszag: 'No wise person' should expect $1 trillion in DOD cuts

Political and operational realities make the prospects slim that the $1 trillion in scheduled Pentagon budget cuts ever will be enacted, says one former White House budget chief.

Peter Orszag, President Obama's first Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, wrote in a Wednesday Bloomberg column that "no wise person" should expect the defense cuts to be that deep.

For one, weapons programs are difficult to cancel, Orszag wrote.

What's more, "troop reductions are a harder sell even than weapons cuts — which is saying something," Obama's former budget director wrote.

"And that’s true even assuming that, over the next decade, we don’t face any new national-security risk, which would undermine any nascent support for fiscal constraint," Orszag wrote. "So no wise person should bet that the promised defense-spending reductions will in the end be fully implemented."

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