US President Barack Obama warned Monday that government spending cuts due to take effect this week would harm economic progress, and urged lawmakers to take action before the March 1 deadline.
"The last thing you want to see is Washington get in the way of progress," Obama told a meeting at the White House of governors from the 50 US states.
"Unfortunately, in just four days Congress is poised to allow a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts to kick in that will slow our economy, eliminate good jobs and leave a lot of folks who are already pretty thinly stretched scrambling to figure out what to do."
Lawmakers returned to Washington Monday after a week-long recess, but despite proposals being discussed in both chambers of Congress there appeared to be little chance of a deal that could be agreed upon by both Republicans and Democrats.
Speaker of the House John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, put the blame squarely at the feet of Obama and his Democrats for using the crisis to secure more tax hikes and ignoring the need for spending cuts.
"The president proposed the sequester, yet he's far more interested in staging campaign rallies than urging his fellow Democrats to actually pass a plan," Boehner said.
The so-called sequester, a package of automatic budget cuts passed in August 2011, was intended to pressure lawmakers to forge 10-year deficit reductions worth 1.2 trillion dollars.
Obama has warned that if the cuts are not replaced with a less severe deficit-reduction package, government programmes could be damaged and bureaucrats at the Defence Department could face furloughs.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Monday was the latest cabinet officer to warn of damaging consequences, pointing to fewer security agents at airports and slower cargo inspections.
Republicans however have expressed scepticism about the warnings, with Congressman Eric Cantor calling the rhetoric a "false choice."