Obama and G.O.P. Spar Over Direction of Cuts

WASHINGTON - President Obama sparred with Congressional Republicans on Saturday over who was to blame for long flight delays this week but neither side moved closer to a consensus on how to minimize the broader impact of federal spending cuts on the public.

A day after Congress voted to avert further air traffic slowdowns, Mr. Obama chided lawmakers for looking out for their own interests as frequent fliers rather than caring for less privileged Americans harmed by other spending cuts.

Republicans responded by accusing the president of deliberately provoking a crisis for political purposes.

The back-and-forth underscored the partisan divide over the so-called sequester, a series of automatic spending cuts that both parties agreed to in a failed effort to force the two sides to come together to craft a more judicious plan to rein in huge deficits. When furloughs of air traffic controllers resulted in a cascade of airport backups this week, lawmakers rushed to authorize the transportation secretary to move around funds.

“This week, the sequester hurt travelers, who were stuck for hours in airports and on planes, and rightly frustrated by it,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address taped in advance and aired on Saturday. “Maybe because they fly home each weekend, the members of Congress who insisted these cuts take hold finally realized that they actually apply to them too.”

In the Republican response, Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House transportation committee, asked why the controllers were furloughed.

“Because,” he said, “there are some in the Obama administration who thought inflicting pain on the public would give the president more leverage to avoid making necessary spending cuts and to impose more tax hikes on the American people.”

Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Shuster in their addresses called for replacing the sequester with a more targeted plan to avoid such indiscriminate effects, but the White House and Congressional Republicans have starkly different ideas about what such a plan should look like.

It hardly went unnoticed in Washington that the two sides have not managed to come together to ameliorate the impact of budget cuts on many other Americans. The air passengers inconvenienced this week, however, included business travelers and relatively better off Americans with the ear of their representatives.

Mr. Obama pointed out that the sequester continues to affect children kicked out of Head Start, seniors deprived of Meals on Wheels and military families cut off from services.

“We can’t just keep putting Band-Aids on every cut,” he said. “It’s not a responsible way to govern. There is only one way to truly fix the sequester: by replacing it before it causes further damage.”

Mr. Shuster said the Obama administration always had enough flexibility to avert the airport bottlenecks of the last week. “This episode is yet another demonstration of why we need to replace the president’s sequester with smarter, more responsible cuts,” he said. “The American people deserve better, and leaders in Washington have an obligation to respect your time and money.”