Fox News' Bret Baier downplayed the consequences of the across-the-board automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, ignoring that the cuts could cost up to 1.6 million new jobs.

On the July 30 edition of Special Report, Baier reported that unpaid furlough days for civilian workers at the Defense department may be cut to as few as 6 days. The Fox host also noted that “last week the IRS canceled one of its five furlough days" and that “a little budget shifting allowed the FAA to avoid furloughing its air traffic controllers."

Unmentioned, however, was that sequestration could cost the economy as many as 1.6 million new jobs, according to a recent report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Additionally, the CBO report showed that real gross domestic product could be as much as 1.2 percent higher without the sequestration cuts. In a letter to Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the CBO explained:

[T]he Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed a proposal under which the automatic spending reductions in effect for 2013 would be canceled at the beginning of August and none of the reductions scheduled for 2014 would be implemented; for 2013, mandatory payments made after early August would be at the rates in effect prior to sequestration, and agencies would have an additional year to obligate the restored discretionary funding. 

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The full ranges CBO uses for those parameters suggest that, in the third quarter of calendar year 2014, real GDP could be between 0.2 percent and 1.2 percent higher, and employment 0.3 million to 1.6 million higher, under the proposal than under current law. Because those estimates indicate the effects of a prospective change in law, they do not encompass the full impact of the sequestration that has already occurred.

Furthermore, sequestration cuts have already hit programs designed to help struggling Americans including Medicare, Head Start, and Meals on Wheels.  

Baier's is just the most recent of many attempts by Fox to downplay economic harm from sequestration.