President Obama has called for an end to across-the-board budget cuts that were triggered two years ago when Congress and the White House were unable to reach a budget deal.  The "sequester" has been a limited success in putting a brake on out-of-control federal spending.  Total cuts amounted to around $80 billion over the last 2 years, most of that from national defense, despite the fact that the sequester was supposed to cut a dollar of domestic spending for every defense dollar cut.

Getting rid of sequester is necessary if the president wants to implement his plan to increase federal spending by 7% next fiscal year.

Washington Examiner:

At the House Democratic Caucus retreat in Philadelphia, the president “will propose to end the across-the-board sequester cuts that threaten our economy and our military,” said a White House official.

“The president’s budget will fully reverse those cuts for domestic priorities and match those investments dollar-for-dollar with the resources our troops need to keep America safe,” the White House official added.

Under so-called sequestration, automatic budget cuts were implemented when lawmakers could not reach a spending compromise in the months following Obama’s re-election.

The White House warned that the cuts would wreak havoc on the economy, a prediction that never materialized.

A two-year budget compromise at the end of 2013 partially rolled back the mandatory cuts, but they are slated to return unless lawmakers reach a new spending deal.

Obama will officially unveil his budget on Monday, which is expected to call for a 7 percent hike in federal spending in fiscal 2016.

Republicans have already called the proposal dead on arrival, as it relies on $320 billion in tax increases over the next decade.

Obama will also use his remarks to Democrats on Thursday to pressure Republicans to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security. Conservatives are attempting to unite behind a plan that rolls back Obama’s unilateral deferral of millions of deportations, while not jeopardizing the agency’s work to protect the homeland

The sequester was mostly a failure because it exempted entitlements – the real culprit in the expanding budget.  President Obama won't even talk about reining in Social Security and Medicare costs, so deficit reduction will once again be left out of the conversation.

With a budget deficit still near half a trillion dollars, and the CBO projecting trillion-dollar deficits again by 2025, it would be madness to throw away the one tool available to Congress to get control of spending.  The irrationality of the president's budget philosophy has never been clearer than his proposals to take the restraints off federal spending again, just as pressures on the budget due to an expected increase in debt servicing because of higher interest rates and continued growth in entitlements threatens to cause the deficit to explode.