President Obama has released the details of his fiscal 2010 budget, most of which had been widely known since February, but he did add a proposal to kill or cut 121 federal programs for a savings of $17 billion.
The president insisted it was not "chump change," but like his request of his Cabinet to find $100 million in administrative savings, this one was ridiculed by critics as too small to make a difference -- less than half of 1 percent of a planned $3.6 trillion in federal spending. Even as a percentage of discretionary spending -- that part of the budget over which Congress and the president have direct control -- it's still small, just over 1 percent.
About half the savings are previously announced cuts in defense spending and the rest a grab bag of relatively small domestic programs. Targeted, for example, are $35 million for obsolete radio navigation systems; $66 million for Even Start, a program of doubtful effectiveness that duplicates other early-childhood programs; $7 million for an education grant program that benefits only 15 school districts; and -- a heartbreaker for somebody at the Department of Education -- $632,000 for the post of education attache in Paris.
These cuts are small in the totality of the budget, but they have great symbolic importance as a test of Obama's determination to fight for them and a test of his seriousness in tackling the federal deficit.
Indeed, many of the targeted spending cuts were culled from a list of 151 projects that President Bush had tried to kill or cut, but over time the Republican-run Congress came to believe that it could ignore that president's fitful attempts at fiscal discipline.
Obama is already losing ground with the Democratic-run Congress in his effort to control the budget. Rather than eliminate the C-17 cargo aircraft, a House committee added $2.2 billion to buy four more of them and Congress seems prepared to ignore him altogether on trying to cut farm subsidies.
In the totality of the federal budget, $17 billion really is chump change, but, chump or not, facing a fiscal 2010 budget deficit that could reach $1.5 trillion, the president and Congress have to start somewhere.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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