President's budget seeks to rein in discretionary spending

President Bush on Monday proposed a budget for fiscal 2007 that would hold overall discretionary spending below the rate of inflation and reduce nonsecurity discretionary spending below 2006 levels, in part by scaling back or terminating 141 programs.

The president's budget proposal, released Monday, focuses on decreasing the federal deficit from a projected $423 billion in fiscal 2006 to $354 billion in fiscal 2007. The requested program cuts would contribute $14.7 billion in savings, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

In presenting the budget, OMB Director Joshua Bolten highlighted the administration's success last year in getting Congress to hold discretionary spending increases below inflation. The proposed 2007 budget seeks to repeat this accomplishment even as Defense Department spending would increase 6.9 percent while inflation is slated to be 3.3 percent.

Bolten said the president's proposals to restrict or cut program funding were based on whether programs were obtaining results and fulfilling essential priorities. To date, OMB has evaluated the effectiveness of 794 programs, or about 80 percent of those that will eventually receive grades, using a questionnaire called the Program Assessment Rating Tool.

According to results released along with the budget request, 15 percent of those programs have been rated "effective," 29 percent were deemed "moderately effective" and 28 percent were graded as "adequate," while only 4 percent were found to be ineffective. The remaining 24 percent received marks of "results not demonstrated," indicating a lack of effective metrics to mark accomplishments.

"My administration expects to be held accountable for significantly improving the way the government works," President Bush said in his introduction to the budget. "In every program, and in every agency, we are measuring success not by good intentions or by dollars spent, but rather by results achieved."

In remarks following the budget presentation, OMB Deputy Director for Management Clay Johnson stressed that PART evaluations did not correlate directly with the president's funding requests, which might increase funding for programs considered ineffective due to lack of resources, or might zero out the budget for a program deemed obsolete.

Last year, the president's budget proposal recommended cutting or scaling back 154 programs, and Congress followed 89 of those recommendations for a savings of $6.5 billion, according to OMB. Bolten said many of the 2006 programs that Congress continued to fund against the president's suggestion will appear on the 2007 list to be cut.

OMB has not yet released a list of the 141 programs targeted for significant cutbacks.

But Philip Joyce, professor of public policy and public administration at The George Washington University, said it may be difficult for the president to obtain congressional backing for the proposed cuts.

"You have to ask the question, particularly in an election year, if the Congress is going to have the appetite for cutting discretionary domestic proposals," Joyce said. His research indicates that in the past three decades, there have been only three years in which nondefense discretionary spending was lower than the year before: 1982, 1987 and 1996.

The president's budget proposal included several elements that have appeared before but have yet to be enacted. The president again has called for a switch to biennial budgeting to allow lawmakers more time to address other issues and for the creation of congressional results and "sunset" commissions to systematically review agency and program performance.

Bush also proposed statutory limits on discretionary spending that would be activated as needed through "trigger" mechanisms, and asked for presidential line-item veto power that could pass the test of constitutionality.

Also on Monday, OMB launched a Web site that makes program assessment information easily available to the public. The site, ExpectMore.gov, allows people to browse PART data by rating, program keyword or general topic.

"ExpectMore.gov honestly shows how government programs perform and whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth," Johnson said. "It is our hope that Congress and the American people will use the information on this site to hold us accountable and begin to 'expect more' from the performance and improvement of the programs that serve them."

For much of the day Monday, however, key elements of ExpectMore.gov were not functioning.