President Barack Obama is stepping up the pressure on Congress to avoid the sequester, across-the-board cuts to federal government spending.

The president’s the-sky-will-fall message is meant to scare Americans. He warns that if the sequester is triggered in March, the most dire things will happen — FBI agents will be let go; flights will be delayed; criminals will be released from prisons; and teachers, police and firefighters will be laid off.

But are these dramatic consequences really the first things that would happen if federal spending were to be trimmed about 9 percent?

It’s obvious that Obama and others, including Pentagon officials, are highlighting the most dramatic long-term consequences that could result from reduced spending.

Is it really not possible for federal bureaucrats to prioritize spending in a way that would not result in first responders being laid off or prisoners being released?

Obama says that cutting spending for all programs, good or bad, essential or non-essential, makes no sense. He says it’s better to trim spending selectively, where there is waste or inefficiency.

He’s right. But both he and Congress have little credibility when it comes to cutting spending.

A recent Washington Post investigation revealed that a 2011 plan that reportedly cut $38 billion in federal spending was mostly gimmicks. Obama called the $38 billion cuts “the largest annual spending cuts in our history.”

The Post revealed that $6 billion in savings at the Census Bureau came from the $6 billion spent to conduct the 2010 census that was not spent in 2011 because the census is done only once every 10 years.

Similar smoke-and-mirrors numbers were found in Defense Department cuts where the Post found that $5 billion in Pentagon spending cuts was traced to one-time spending for base closing and relocation work that had been completed.

The Post found that through the 12 largest cuts, federal agencies reportedly withstood $23 billion in spending reductions but did not shed a single employee. How is that possible?

This exposure of Washington’s accounting games builds support for the admittedly messy sequester. The thinking is that since Washington cannot be trusted regarding specific cuts that appear to be little more than accounting gimmicks, then harsher medicine is necessary.

In a statement released Tuesday warning of dire consequences from the sequester, Obama said he had “offered a balanced approach to deficit reduction.” Yet while the 2011 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan, which Obama has praised, suggested three or four dollars of spending reduction for every dollar of tax increase, Obama now offers only one dollar of spending reduction for every dollar of tax increase.

Obama also said in his statement that he wants to “cut spending that we don’t need, get rid of programs that aren’t working.” But those are the same words then-candidate Obama used in his 2008 campaign for president. He vowed to go through the federal budget “line-by-line” to find programs that were not effective and eliminate that spending.

Where are the news stories about any federal programs that have been downsized or eliminated?

There is some truth in what Obama says, comparing the sequester to a “meat cleaver” approach to cutting spending. But he has little credibility in promising smarter, targeted spending cuts after boasting about budget cuts from 2011 that were called historic, but turned out to be bogus. And the scare tactics being used to pressure Congress to stop the sequester from being triggered are equally suspect, since Americans know that some spending reductions must be possible before essential serv-ices such as police, firefighters, prison guards, teachers and air traffic controllers are cut.

The sequester might be a lousy way to cut spending, but given Washington’s credibility gap, it might be the only way.