White House and Republicans renew budget talks

"I'm not sure what it is in the food safety area," said Vilsack whose agency has raised the prospect of the furlough repeatedly in the past two weeks.

An official with the US Department of Health and Human Services said the White House's Office of Management and Budget had yet to tell the department how much to cut if there is no deal in Congress to stop the sequester.

"It's fair to say that nothing really changes on March 1," the official said. "We're all going on estimates until OMB informs us of what the actual percentage cut will be."    

The country's top Wall Street regulators are not expecting layoffs or furloughs. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have so far mostly downplayed the impact of the cuts.

That means traders, financial firms and publicly traded companies are unlikely to need to prepare, for now, for any major immediate disruption of financial markets.

In addition, the US public seems only dimly aware of the sequester, according to a poll released Thursday.

In findings which may help explain the lack of urgency in Congress so far, about 43 percent of those polled had only heard a little about the planned cuts.

ONE FISCAL BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

While the White House and Republican leaders were discussing sequestration, others in Congress were thinking about the next big budget fight: the government funding deadline on March 27.  

The Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Hal Rogers from Kentucky, is preparing a stopgap funding bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of March.

The plan assumes the cuts remain in effect for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends September 30. That would cut the overall fiscal 2013 budget for discretionary expenditures, including the military, to around $974 billion from $1.043 trillion.

Essentially, it is a recognition of the huge gulf between Democrats and Republicans over how to replace the cuts.

"It's the chairman's intention to keep them separate," a Rogers aide said. "You don't want to risk a government shutdown on top of sequestration."  

A series of fiscal crises over how to reduce the budget deficit and $16 trillion national debt have rocked Washington and eroded business confidence.    

James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the US economy was ready to take off if only Washington could sort out the budget.    

"If the US could get rid of the cloud of uncertainty associated with medium- and long-term fiscal uncertainty it would be a huge positive for the US economy, far surpassing any temporary negative effects of passing tax increases or spending cuts," he told reporters in New York.