Continuing on in our blog series, we will be discussing discretionary spending proposals in the President's budget.

Both CBO and OMB in the last week released sequestration reports, technical reports that detail whether the government is adhering to discretionary spending caps. Normally, these are unnoteworthy reports, but there is a small detail in the most recent ones that is worth noting.

After hinting at how they would cut defense spending yesterday, the Obama Administration has given out another small detail of its upcoming budget. According to the Washington Post's Ed O' Keefe, the White House will request a 0.5 percent pay increase for federal employees in FY 2013, on the heels of a two-year pay freeze.

Congress has a long checklist of things it has to do by the end of September. On Tuesday, it informally crossed one thing off when the House passed a "clean" extension of transportation programs through at least the end of the year. The Senate should pass it soon as well.

On OMB's blog, OMB director Jack Lew talked about his instructions to agencies to cut 5 percent off their 2011 budget for their FY 2013 request. In addition, they are instructed to list additional savings that would result in a 10 percent cut. 

Faithful readers of this blog know by now how the trigger contained in the Budget Control Act generally works. The BCA creates a twelve-member Joint Committee that is tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in savings over ten years. If the Committee fails or Congress fails to pass legislation that saves at least $1.2 trillion, a trigger will make up the difference starting in 2013 (unless a balanced budget amendment passes Congress).

The caps on discretionary spending were, of course, the concrete centerpiece of last week's budget deal. Considering the importance of the caps, CBO published a blog explaining how they work and what would happen to discretionary spending over the ten-year window.

First, they go into some background on the caps:

Update: CBO has scored Boehner's legislation, showing it to reduce deficits by a total of $850 billion from 2012-2021. The discretionary caps are $1.1 trillion below CBO's March baseline over ten years, but only $840 billion below a baseline that incorporates the final CR.

In this next installment of our FY 2012 appropriations update, we will detail the actions that the House has taken since our last update on May 24. Despite the recess last week, the House has managed to stay active with the appropriations process.

In the past few days, CBO has released a few documents that might be of interest to budget wonks.

The first is a further analysis of the final FY 2011 spending agreement that was passed a month ago. The estimate not only shows CBO's updated discretionary spending estimates for this year, but also what discretionary spending will be over ten years using CBO's baseline convention of inflation growth.