The White House announced Tuesday that it is canceling tours of the president's home for the foreseeable future as the sequester spending cuts begin to bite and the administration makes good on its warnings of painful decisions.

Announcement of the decision -- made in an email from the White House Visitors Office -- came hours after The Washington Times reported on another administration email that seemed to show at least one agency has been instructed to make sure the cuts are as painful as President Obama promised they would be.

In the internal email, Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown said he asked if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact, and he said he was told not to do anything that would lessen the dire impacts Congress had been warned of.

"We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that 'APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.' So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be," Mr. Brown, in the internal email, said his superiors told him.

Neither Mr. Brown nor the main APHIS office in Washington returned calls seeking comment, but Agriculture Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack, who oversees the agency, told Congress he is trying to give flexibility where he can.

"If we have flexibility, we're going to try to use it to make sure we use sequester in the most equitable and least disruptive way," the secretary told Rep. Kristi L. Noem (R-SD), who grilled Mr. Vilsack about the email. "There are some circumstances, and we've talked a lot about the meat inspection, where we do not have that flexibility because there are so few accounts."

Ms. Noem told Mr. Vilsack that the email made it sound like the administration was sacrificing flexibility in order to justify its earlier dire predictions.

"I'm hopeful that isn't an agenda that's been put forward," the congresswoman told Mr. Vilsack.

READ FULL SOURCE ARTICLE: 03/05/2013

Editor's Note: If anyone believes that the Obama Administration isn't trying very hard to make the American people feel as much discomfort over the sequester as humanly possible in an effort to play Chicago thug politics, they are, indeed, beyond clueless...