White House: Obama wants to cut $17B from budget

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama asked Congress on Thursday to eliminate or trim 121 federal programs for a savings of $17 billion in the coming budget year. Many of the proposed cuts have already been rejected by Obama's allies in Congress, including some programs that his predecessor, President George W. Bush, repeatedly sought to end.

White House budget director Peter Orszag said the president's plan for program cuts is just a start and that a lot more needs to be done to dig the government out of its fiscal hole, especially curbing the growth of the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs for the elderly and the poor.
Answering criticism that his cuts were but a drop in a multi-trillion-dollar spending bucket, Obama said: "Some of the cuts we're putting forward today are more painful than others. Some are larger than others. In fact a few of the programs we eliminate will produce less than a million dollars in savings. Outside of Washington, that's still a lot of money."

In a preview, administration officials named a few examples Thursday which mostly represented easy-to-pluck targets, like ending the Education Department's attache in Paris, at a savings of $632,000 a year. Another example: the obsolete LORAN-C marine navigation system, which still gets $35 million a year despite being made obsolete by the satellite-based Global Positioning System.