And we've worked now to get all of our plants designated critical and up and running to some extent. I don't know how they're going to recover here for a while.
So, right now, the acceleration of the decline of our sales are overwhelming basically the restructuring we've done in the first half and the new -- and the incremental restructuring we have going on at this point in time. Much of this is visible in the Q4 plan.Sales in March were down 22% versus 2019 despite our capacity being back to 96% by the end of the month. We are still looking at 12 months or less on the total pot. But the third quarter, in particular, is really -- is because the drop-off you see in those sales, I think -- what did we drop off? We made the decision as OCE on March 10 when I came back from a conference in New York when I was presenting at the JP Morgan as the only CEO who showed up.
We've had notes. And as a result, over the last month-and-a-half, we've been able to extend the CP maturities from about 20 days out to 45 days; and included in that, we built a $1 billion cash buffer here in the United States, which we will revisit as we go through time here. He's a book and ship company. And I don't want to get into a big political discussion despite my earlier rhetoric. So, he'll probably have another $80 million for the whole year next year. And to help you bridge between the February meeting and what we see today as a business, we had approximately $135 million that we booked out of the funnel since February.
So, I think that I feel very comfortable even today, as I talk to the Audit Committee yesterday morning, this 14%, 15% negative third quarter is well in tune. But right now, the definition of best cost has not changed, no.Really appreciate it. Leaders need to be at the front and fighting the war and winning this war.And I want to make sure that a special recognition goes to the board, who has been working with us very closely with special meetings. You'll see in the slide here, another conversation I had with the executive board a couple of weeks ago, we made a decision at the OCE level that we -- at the board level of the OCE, we took a 15% base salary cut effective April 1, which is now in place. Emerson has been open throughout this whole process. I'm evaluation an organization, which ones are rising to these challenges, which ones have the right stuff and which ones are bunkering. Our second half SG&A spend versus our original plan is now down over 10%. It was a very unfortunate situation. We've had letters.
The thousands, many of them will be in trouble as we go through it.So, typically, when I think about the two segments, the downstream refining and the upstream oil and gas, I believe they have different economic cycles. And then, Dave, there's been a lot of talk.