Commentary—

Looking For Cuts In All The Wrong Places

By Jill Lancelot

In the $2.7 trillion budget the president just sent to Congress, he proposes cutting or terminating 141 federal programs to save just over $14 billion. This may sound like a lot, but when we’re looking down the barrel of a $423 billion dollar federal deficit, it’s about time for the administration to trade in its budget butter knife for a cleaver and start slashing some big-ticket boondoggles.

Some of the proposed cuts do make a lot of sense — the $500 million we currently spend for oil and gas research, for example, is little more than a corporate welfare slush fund for companies swimming in Benjamins.

Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule. Most of the president’s proposed cuts would provide little bang for the buck, and precedent shows that most of them won’t ever see the light of day. After all, the final decisions lay with Congress, and the president has yet to force its hand by exercising a single veto.

The bigger problem, however, is that so much of the budget is taken off the carving table before the first cut is made. The administration’s reluctance to address seriously Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense, and homeland security spending leaves less than 16 percent of the total federal budget on the chopping block. This surely makes it more difficult — if not impossible — to save money from the overall budget and thereby reduce the deficit.

Surely the $441.5 billion in proposed defense spending is one area where a few cuts could go a long way. That budget is rife with potential slashes that would help the budget picture but not reduce our nation’s defense capabilities at all. In fact, none of the proposed cuts in the president’s budget follow through on the administration’s earlier promise to transform and modernize the military, and to cut Cold War relics that are designed to combat threats that no longer exist.

Take for example the F/A-22 Raptor, which initially was designed to deeply penetrate Soviet airspace by avoiding radar and traveling at supersonic speed. Without even taking all of the cost and production problems into consideration, it seems as though someone forgot to tell fighter plane proponents that no other country comes even close to competing with our nation’s current air superiority. Cutting the F/A-22 would save taxpayers $2.78 billion right now and billions more in the long run.

Another apple ripe for picking is National Missile Defense, which might look good on paper, but in practice doesn’t work. Weighing in at $11 billion, this is the largest single weapons project on the budget.

Defense isn’t the only place where eliminating special-interest back-scratching could make real dents in the deficit. Like last year, President Bush would reform the Agriculture Department’s 70-year-old farm programs that funnel billions of dollars in subsidies to a handful of rich agribusiness companies. If enacted, these proposals would save $7.7 billion dollars over ten years. While this would certainly be an admirable start, it is hardly the belt-tightening, sweeping reform the nation really needs, especially considering that annual payments have skyrocketed past the $20 billion mark. Worse, these same reforms failed to survive the congressional gauntlet in 2005 and there is no reason to think they’ll slip by unnoticed this year.

By ignoring the beefier portions of the federal budget while he “nickels and dimes” us with smaller spending cuts, the president is just fiddling around the edges. We need bold, veto-filled leadership for America to help lead us out of this deficit era, or tomorrow’s deficits will be much larger than what we face today.

(Jill Lancelot is president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog.)