The House today voted 414-2 to advance a bill requiring the Obama administration to produce details on how automatic trillion-dollar spending cuts set to take effect in January would affect government agencies, including U.S. EPA, the Energy Department and the Interior Department.

The lopsided vote belies an increasingly acrimonious fight over how to address the "sequester" that both parties' leaders endorsed as a last-ditch option to force a broader agreement on limiting the long-term federal debt.

With $1.2 trillion in cuts set to begin next year unless Congress prevents them, Democrats are calling attention to their harsh blow to priorities such as EPA and DOE while the GOP focuses on their impact at the Pentagon.

The House legislation now heads to the Senate, where an already approved farm bill contains a similar bipartisan amendment attached by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). But in a sign of partisan tension that is guaranteed to dog the sequestration debate until December or beyond, Republicans have spent the past two days blasting Murray for a speech Monday in which she suggested that letting Bush-era tax cuts expire at year's end could force lawmakers to reach a sweeping fiscal deal.

The White House budget office said last week that it had not yet begun reaching out to agencies to plan for a possible sequestration of funding, but a spokesman vowed that the administration would be ready to carry out the cuts if Congress cannot agree on the type of "balanced deficit reduction" that President Obama would support (E&E Daily, July 13).

Although such a "balanced" plan would almost surely require raising new revenue to offset spending cuts -- a notion most Republicans have ruled out -- House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said in a statement after the vote that he supported the transparency bill but that "the real goal remains reaching a bipartisan solution to replace these cuts with other common sense savings."

Environmental groups and other nonprofits pushing for lawmakers to defuse the sequester have estimated that agencies would take a budgetary hit of 8 percent to 9 percent in 2013 if the cuts take effect.

The two House members voting against today's bill were New York Democrats Maurice Hinchey and Eliot Engel.