White House: spending cuts to have “devastating impact”

The Obama administration released a detailed report Friday signaling how $110 billion in spending cuts set for January would affect federal programs, reports CNN.

The White House budget office said the cuts "would have a devastating impact on important defense and nondefense programs," such as like patrolling U.S. borders and air traffic control.

The drastic spending cuts, called sequestration, were mandated by the failure of last year's congressional "supercommittee" to come to an agreement on a package of spending cuts and tax hikes.

Unless Congress comes up with a different plan totaling $1.2 trillion, the cuts will automatically go into effect in January and would require an across-the-board cut of 9 percent to most Pentagon programs and an 8 percent cut in many domestic programs, according to AP. 

"Sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments, and core government functions," the report said.

ABC News reports that the White House had no say in which programs would be cut or by how much. The specifics of the cuts were decided by lawmakers during discussions about raising the debt ceiling last year.

Republicans have pounced on the report, claiming that the Obama administration is not doing enough to hold off the impending "fiscal cliff".

“This report confirms that the president’s ‘sequester’ is a serious threat to our national security and must be replaced,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement to ABC.

“But with only a few months before they’re scheduled to go into effect, President Obama and Senate Democrats have taken no action whatsoever to avert these cuts," he said.

House Republicans have passed their own measure to avoid the cuts but since the deal included no new revenue and focused only on spending cuts, the plan did not pass muster with the Democrats.