At more than 100 pages, last summer's debt ceiling deal was a fairly large bill. And it was passed in a hurry, as the federal government was literally hours away from hitting the debt ceiling and facing a shutdown and economic turmoil. The manufactured crisis resulted in legislation that would automatically cut $1.2 trillion in federal spending through an arcane mechanism known as “sequestration” that few lawmakers fully understood. As those automatic cuts draw nearer, lawmakers are expressing confusion over how sequestration works, providing yet another example of how crisis budgeting can lead to unexpected and unintended results.

Almost immediately after passing the bill, some members of Congress demonstrated they were unsure of the ramifications of the debt ceiling deal. For example, House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-FL) said he wasn’t sure if the Veterans Administration (VA) was subject to the automatic cuts included in the debt ceiling deal, also known as the Budget Control Act (BCA).

Since it created the so-called sequestration process back in the 1980s, Congress has passed a number of laws specifically exempting some programs from automatic cuts and amended the law that governs sequestration – the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, or “Gramm-Rudman” – many times. This has resulted in sometimes contradictory language in current law. Hence the confusion over the VA: while Gramm-Rudman states that the VA is exempt from automatic cuts, it also contains a section that says "Veterans' medical care" can be cut by up to two percent. The BCA employs existing language from Gramm-Rudman but applies its own modifications to that law.

Miller, confused by the discrepancy, asked the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for clarification. In these situations, OMB has wide power to interpret the law. After deliberating for eight months, in late April, OMB released a letter announcing that all VA accounts, including medical care, were exempt from the automatic cuts. In the intervening months, Miller had introduced his own bill reconciling the conflicting clauses, but Congress has yet to act on it.

While cuts to veterans' health care represent a relatively small amount of funding, a much larger pot of money – $100 billion in war spending – has also become a source of confusion. Some members of Congress are convinced that war spending was exempted from the automatic cuts since it is treated differently from other spending, both in the budget process and in the BCA. At first, the Defense Department agreed, but last month, OMB corrected the department and announced that war funds would be subject to the automatic cuts since such spending is not on the list of exempt programs.

OMB's decision to include war spending is significant. By adding almost $100 billion to the defense spending category, the rest of the Pentagon budget will avoid deeper cuts ($55 billion will be cut from $630 billion instead of $530 billion). Instead of an almost 10.5 percent cut, all defense spending will now be cut by 8.5 percent. Additionally, congressional budgeters won't be able to "shelter" defense programs from the automatic cuts by shifting pet projects into war spending accounts. (Earlier this year, the Senate shifted $4 billion in Pentagon spending into the funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.)

Congressional defense hawks are livid over the decision. House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon said, "I am disappointed the president has made this choice, since there is no clear mandate for it in the law." A defense analyst, who acknowledged that the law was "vague," said that "the accepted understanding around Washington has been that [war] funding is exempt." OMB's decision could redouble congressional action to "turn off" the automatic cuts to defense.

Despite these recent clarifications, areas of confusion remain, including concerns about how the automatic cuts in January 2013 will be calculated. It is not clear if the automatic cuts are taken as a set amount, regardless of what Congress budgets, or if the cuts are instead targeted at a given budget level below the current pace of spending.

The differences can be significant. If Congress pushes a budget lower than the current level, or baseline, do the automatic cuts still apply in full force, or does the budget get “credited” with already having been cut? For instance, in 2013, defense spending will be cut by $55 billion; under the first interpretation, if Congress budgets $55 billion below the baseline for defense, it is still hit with $55 billion in automatic cuts. In the second interpretation, the defense budget would not be automatically cut because Congress would be "credited" for budgeting below the baseline.

The House is pushing forward a budget that includes spending levels lower than the spending caps in the BCA, but if the House is wrong in assuming that these lower spending levels will reduce the size of the automatic cuts, they may be inadvertently cutting programs much more deeply than they anticipated.

Faced with this uncertainty, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced a new bill that would force the administration to fully explain the legislation Congress passed in August. It orders the administration to outline the spending cuts that would occur under sequestration, program by program, and to publish "any other data and explanations that enhance public understanding of the sequester and actions to be taken under it."

With all of the confusion over what the Budget Control Act does, one thing is clear: many members of Congress had little idea of what they were passing in August 2011. Tens of billions of dollars in vital public protections and safety net programs are at stake. The impacts of rushing changes to the budgeting process through Congress at the 11th hour may become clear to millions of American families before the law's authors fully understand what they have done.