Where will Bush cut budget?
Lawmakers, bureaucrats and the special interests who live off the taxpayers are eagerly awaiting President Bush’s next budget, which insiders say will be the toughest he has ever submitted.
While the news focus this week will be on Bush’s inauguration and his long-term plans for the next four years, the shorter-term focus is, as always, on money and whose programs will be cut or frozen in the president’s fiscal 2006 spending plan. The battle lines have already begun to form.
Last week, Heritage Foundation President Edwin J. Feulner, one of Bush’s staunchest allies, fired a warning shot across the president’s budgetary bow in a sharply critical assessment of Bush’s fiscal policies over the past four years.
Acknowledging that Bush ran and won on a second-term agenda that called for limiting the growth of government, Feulner skeptically said that “it remains to be seen whether the rhetoric of the president’s campaign will be manifest in Washington in the coming years.”
Among his complaints, Feulner said it was especially “disappointing … to see Congress pass and the president sign the biggest farm bill and the biggest education bill in our nation’s history.”
Well, that was Bush’s first term. In the second term, say budget watchers, you will see a new Bush who will be more aggressive on discretionary, non-defense expenditures whose overall levels in 2005 will be essentially frozen next year. Bush gave a peek into his budget plans last week when he told The Washington Times his spending blueprint was “going to be tough.”
Some of the spending cuts that have been leaking out include taking the ax to the waste-ridden Community Development Block Grants that have mushroomed to $5 billion under Bush, but could be slashed by as much as 50 percent. With an annual deficit of more than $400 billion, it is hard to defend a program that is building horseback riding trails, bike paths, yacht harbors, swimming pools, movie theaters, water parks and other spending boondoggles.
Budget officials tell me that other Housing and Urban Development programs will be cut. Indeed, housing programs overall are expected to be frozen at last year’s levels.
The National Science Foundation’s social research grants, which have long been criticized as wasteful, will be cut. So will the National Institutes of Health, which has seen its budget skyrocket over the past decade, especially in the past four years.
Bush will try once again to slash the Army Corps of Engineers, whose building projects have wasted billions of dollars. He proposed a nearly $600 million cut this year, but to no avail. Of course, you can’t get a real handle on spending if you don’t restrain the growth in entitlements, and the administration’s prescription drug benefit program will sharply boost Medicare spending in the coming years — big time.
One way to curb entitlements is to block grant programs to the states. Last year, the administration proposed turning Medicaid over to the states in a plan that would have given governors wider discretion to tighten eligibility rules. Bush will be back with this proposal, arguing it is time to give the states greater flexibility over a health care program they have responsibility for delivering.
Can Bush rein in runaway domestic spending by cutting the fat out of the federal budget? In the absence of political pressures in a non-election year, and with a stronger GOP majority in both chambers, the chances are reasonably good that he can, and will.
Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist.