The House of Representatives has passed a budget agreement aimed at avoiding another government shutdown. How will it affect the sequestration? The nitty-gritty details won’t be known until Jan. 18, but Stan Collender, budget columnist and former staffer on the House and Senate budget committees, says the deal should ease about half of the scheduled budget cuts.

 Cuts scheduled for Medicare providers, however, will still happen. In fact, they’ll be extended all the way into 2022 and 2023.

 “That’s one of the ways they paid for this — they extended cuts into the out years,” he says.