The Sequester: Budget Lessons From the 1980s

In 1979, with a bill to lift the debt ceiling moving through Congress, Phil Gramm, a first-term House Democrat from Texas, proposed an amendment that would require a balanced budget. The amendment failed, but Gramm didn’t give up. He became a Republican, then a senator. And in 1985 President Reagan signed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, forcing Washington to either cut the deficit to zero within five years or face painful automatic cuts to discretionary spending, called “sequestration.”

It was the country’s first sequester, and “no one wanted it to happen,” recalls Wendel Primus, a senior policy adviser to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and a House Democratic staffer at the time. Capitol Hill took to calling it an “automatic Pac-Man” that would gobble up parts of the budget indiscriminately, Primus says.