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Bush's $2.57T Budget Plan Seeks Steep Cuts

39 minutes ago

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) sent Congress a $2.57 trillion budget plan Monday that would boost spending on the military and homeland security but seeks spending cuts across a wide swath of other government programs. Bush's budget would reduce subsidies paid to farmers, cut health programs for poor people and veterans and trim spending on the environment and education.

"It is a budget that sets priorities," Bush said after a meeting with his Cabinet. "It's a budget that reduces and eliminates redundancy. It's a budget that's a lean budget."

Bush acknowledged that it would be difficult to eliminate popular programs but he said programs must prove their worth. "I look forward to explaining to the American people why we made some of the requests that we made in our budget," the president told reporters.

Joshua Bolten, Bush's budget director, said, "Are we going to get everything we asked for? No." But he predicted Congress would likely accept the administration's broad priorities. He said he entered the upcoming congressional budget battle with a "happy spirit."

Democrats immediately branded the budget a "hoax" because it left out the huge future costs for the war in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) and did not include the billions of dollars that will be needed for Bush's No. 1 domestic priority, overhauling Social Security (news - web sites).

Bolten said the administration would soon be coming forward with a supplemental request for an additional $81 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that request was reflected in the overall spending projections in Bush's budget for the current year and into 2006.

But he said including further additional spending for Iraq and Afghanistan "wouldn't be responsible" because it would represent guesses on what will be needed. Bolten also said that even if transition costs for Social Security had been included, the president would still be able to meet his goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 as a percentage of the total economy.

The budget — the most austere of Bush's presidency — would eliminate or vastly scale back 150 government programs. It will spark months of contentious debate in Congress, where lawmakers will fight to protect their favored programs.

House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) of California called Bush's budget "a hoax on the American people. The two issues that dominated the president's State of the Union address — Iraq and Social Security — are nowhere to be found in this budget."

The spending document projects that the deficit will hit a record $427 billion this year, the third straight year that the red ink in dollar terms has set a record. Bush projects that the deficit will fall to $390 billion in 2006 and gradually decline to $233 billion in 2009 and $207 billion in 2010.

Bush's 2006 spending plan, for the budget year that begins next Oct. 1, counts on a healthy economy to boost revenues by 6.1 percent to $2.18 trillion. Spending, meanwhile, would grow by 3.5 percent to $2.57 trillion.