Education advocates and the Obama administration are anxiously eyeing a series of across-the-board cuts set to hit a broad swath of federal domestic and military spending programs early next year, unless a sharply divided Congress can agree on a long-term plan to put the nation's fiscal house in order. Most education lobbyists expect such a deal will prove elusive in the months leading up to the November elections, making the prospect of looming cuts in education and other programs a potentially volatile issue in the congressional and presidential campaigns. Congress then might have to scramble to reach an agreement on averting the cuts in a lame-duck session right after the elections. For now, the administration is making the case that lawmakers should spare education from cuts that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated at up to 7.8 percent of the U.S. Department of Education's budget, which is $68.1 billion in fiscal 2012. Education groups have warned that cuts of that magnitude could translate into tens of thousands of job losses for the field. Estimates on the depth of the cuts vary, and the administration hasn't yet specified an exact percentage. The threat of automatic cuts--known in Washington as "sequestration" because the money would be held back, or sequestered, by the U.S. Treasury instead of being distributed to federal agencies--was put in place last summer to force long-term action from Congress as part of a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling. The presidential and congressional elections could prove critical to the outcome. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has said he would like Congress to enact a short-term deal so that he can help come up with a longer-term spending plan if he's elected. President Barack Obama has put forth a budget that would largely seek to avert the cuts with a mix of other reductions and tax increases; that plan has gone nowhere in Congress.