Budgets, mirrors, media: $3.5 trillion

by Mark Silva

The Obama White House today will hand Congress a recipe for cutting about $17 billion from next year's federal budget.

That's just under 0.5 percent of the $3.55-trillion budget for 2010 that the president already has proposed: A budget running a deficit of about $1.2 trillion.

Better yet: Much of what the White House is sending up in its documentation of cuts today already was proposed as part of the budget outline that the White House already sent up to Congress in February, a senior administration official readily acknowledges.

Half of the cuts are in the Defense Budget, and the White House readily concedes that Defense Secretary Robert Gates already had proposed much of this as part of the new, and bigger, Defense budget that he is seeking. Defense is growing, not shrinking.

In the 24-hour news cycle, however, the advance word that "senior administration officials'' gave the media last night about the budget cuts that it is sending up today drew the anticipated headlines about an administration that recently had called on its Cabinet secretaries to find $100 million in cuts. Look: Now it's $17 billion.

Also, while much of it already is calculated into the budget that the White House sent up to Capitol Hill two months ago, much of it probably never will result in cuts -- Congress has a way of protecting what it wants to protect, and cutting what it wants.

But it's a day's headlines for a White House quickly learning how to play the Washington budget game: While serving up a record new budget, with record deficits, portraying the image of fiscal prudence is essential to sellng it all to the public.

"The president ordered a line-by-line review of the federal budget,'' one senior administration official explained -- and it's difficult to get past the memory of the days when the Bush administration, which also proposed budget cuts largely overlooked by Congress, put forward its "senior administration officials'' to talk to the press. (Vice President Dick Cheney donned that cloak once.)

You'll read about that "line by line scrubbing" in many accounts today

They have looked "at all the government programs and (asked) some hard questions about what works and what doesn't, what's necessary and what's not, what may have made sense once but doesn't any longer, what may never have made sense, so that we could eliminate those things in order to make room for the things that we truly do need,'' the senior official said, explaining cuts in the midst of increases.

Which is all by way of explaining a 2010 budget of $3.55 trillion that is bigger than the $3.1 trillion budget that President George W. Bush proposed for 2009. The Bush team projected a $407 billion deficit, which ultimately reached $1.75 trillion this year, with all the financial bailouts and economic stimulus spending that first Bush and then Obama pushed through Congress to combat a financial market meltdown and soaring unemployment.

"We've made a determination to drive up the deficit in order to stimulate the economy," said Jim Nussle, Bush's budget director then. "I'd much rather work with a balanced budget ... but I also would much rather make sure that our country is protected."

"We inherited, as you know, a large budget deficit -- $1.3 billion,'' the Obama administration official said this week. "We've necessarily had to add to it in order to deal with the economic emergency that we face. But we understand and feel strongly that our long-term growth requires that we tame these deficits and reduce debt.''

Obama has pledged to cut the deficit in half, to $533 billion, by the end of his term, still bigger than anything Bush had ever forecast. Bush won his way in spending with a Republican-run Congress. Obama likely will get the same with a Democratic Congress.

The only "change'' in this program is the cuts themselves: 0.5 percent.

(The mirrors of bygone days: That reflection in Cheney's sunglasses was only the fishing rod in his hand. White House photo.)