Not reporting out data on specific programs ten days ago allowed the Obama administration to escape the politically-charged damage of identifying specific programs and locations that would be hit by the automatic cuts in the middle of the election campaign. That makes a smaller political target for defenders of the F-35, like Lockheed Martin, which integrates the plane, and whose CEO, Bob Stevens, has loudly warned that he will have to send layoff notices to his workers before the election because of the impact of the sequester.

But the Hale interpretation also breaks with past precedent. In the sequesters under the old Gramm Rudman Hollings Act of 1985 (incorporated into the Budget Control Act), OMB defined "PPA" as "program elements" in the defense budget, which means individual programs, like the F-35. This time around, that interpretation would lead to a 9.4 percent cut in resources for each and every specific program; a tough management task. (Though perhaps not that tough: As an Air Force program manager told me last week: "You're telling me I have to manage my program this year with 9.4 percent fewer dollars than I asked for. Heck, that's my job; I do it all the time inside my overall program account. I could do it with no harm to the program at all.")

For DOD, the "accounts as PPAs" interpretation would provide a gift if there is a sequester: flexibility. If a 9.4 percent budget cut hit "Air Force procurement," the Pentagon would have greater flexibility to find those dollars, trading off between various aircraft programs. Defense officials could reduce the funding for additional work on the troubled F-22; they could slow the buy of the new tanker; they could protect the F-35 from the cuts. The budget request for Air Force Aircraft Procurement is $11.3 billion, leaving lots of room for "in flight" budgetary maneuvers. Not so rigid, and good news for Pentagon managers looking for space to maneuver.

Hale's comment may be more wish than reality; it may not last for long. There is no sign from OMB that it agrees, and it is very easy (and probably right, I understand) to read the OMB report the other way. But it tells us the sequester "shadow play" is not over. Flexible or not, though, DOD is in for budget discipline it has not seen over the past decade, something I will be writing about in the coming weeks.

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