THE United States federal budget cuts are an inappropriate measure that will weigh on potential growth, IMF chief Christine Lagarde said yesterday, urging Washington to present "credible" fiscal plans.

Washington enacted across-the-board federal government spending cuts, known as sequestration, in March because Congress could not agree on an alternative. It has meant everything from furloughs for air traffic controllers to fewer planes for the US Navy to smaller subsidies for farmers.

"The budgetary procedure that is in place in the United States, which leads to a budgetary adjustment, seems to us absolutely inappropriate ... because it blindly affects certain expenditures that are essential to support medium- and long-term growth," Lagarde told an economists' conference in southern France.

Her comments echoed those last month from the International Monetary Fund itself, which said: "The deficit reduction in 2013 has been excessively rapid and ill-designed."

In its annual check of the health of the US economy, the IMF forecast economic growth would be a sluggish 1.9 percent this year. The IMF reckons growth would be as much as 1.75 percentage points higher if not for the rush to cut the government's budget deficit.

While the budget cuts that took hold on March 1 do not appear to be hitting government payrolls directly so far, some economists said they were weighing on private employers and helped explain a sharp slowdown in hiring in the health care and social assistance sector.