White House: Budgets '98 percent' in line

by Mark Silva

As the congressional debate over President Barack Obama's $3.55-trillion budget gets underway, the White House acknowledges that it won't get a "Xerox'' copy of its plans from Congress, but says House and Senate budget writers are "98 percent'' in synch with the president's outline.

"We are very pleased that the House and Senate budget committees are taking up resolutions that are fully in line with the president's key priorities for the budget,'' Peter Orszag, director of the president's Office of Management and Budget, said today.

"They are 98 percent the same as the budget proposal the president sent up in February,'' Orszag said in a conference call with reporters this morning. "The resolutions may not be identical twins to what the president submitted, but they are certainly brothers that look an awful lot alike.''

Both House and Senate budget committee proposals meet the president's goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half by 2013, he said. The president, anticipating a deficit of $1.17 trillion in 2010, proposes cutting that to $533 billion by 2013. Orszag said that both House and Senate plans come close to that target.

In "discretionary'' spending - portions of the budget outside of mandatory entitlement-spending and debt payments over which lawmakers have control - the House and Senate plans line up in most of 18 areas, holding the increase to under 1 percent - with "some differences, but relatively modest,'' Orszag said.

The budget-drafting of Democratic-run committees marks only the start of a congressional debate, however, with Republican leaders criticizing the president's spending and deficits as unsupportable during a deep recession.

'It's easy to lob criticisms,'' said Orszag, saying that he hasn't seen "an alternative budget'' in the Senate.

The president, calling passage of his budget initiatives in education, energy and health care crucial for the nation's long-term economic health, acknowledges that he faces a congressional debate over the $3.55-trillion spending plan for 2010.

"We never expected when we printed out our budget that they would simply Xerox it and vote on it,'' Obama said during his prime-time televised news conference Tuesday night, the second of his administration, in a pitch for public support for the budget.

Yet the president insists on meeting a set of "expectations'' in the budget debate.

"I've emphasized repeatedly what I expect out of this budget,'' Obama said. "I expect that there's serious efforts at health care reform and that we are driving down costs for families and businesses and ultimately for the federal and state governments that are going to be broke if we continue on the current path.

"I've said that we've got to have a serious energy policy that frees ourselves from dependence on foreign oil and makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy. We've got to invest in education, K-12 and beyond, to upgrade the skills of the American worker so we can compete in the international economy. And I've said that we've got to start driving our deficit numbers down.''

Orszag said today that all four principles that the president has identified - spending on education, energy and health care and cutting the deficit over four years - are met in the resolutions that the budget committees are launching this week.