Obama to detail budget cuts

President Obama plans on Thursday to unveil a list of 121 budget cuts totaling nearly $17 billion, the latest installment of his pledge to scrub the federal budget "line by line" for wasteful spending.

A senior White House official told reporters that the cuts would total nearly $17 billion in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 and more in subsequent years, with about half the cuts from defense programs and the other half from domestic programs.

"This is an important step in the process, but it's only a step in the process," said the senior administration official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity to discuss the proposals before they are made public. "In many cases we have multiple programs that are doing the same thing, and that drives up administrative costs unnecessarily....We are searching for things that work and trying to cut back on things that do not work."

One example the official cited is a long-range radio navigation system that costs $35 million a year but has been made obsolete by the prevalence of global positioning systems. "It's not used, it's unnecessary, it costs us $35 million a year, and we perpetuate it just through inertia," the official said.

Another is saving $142 million by no longer making payments to states to clean up abandoned mines that have already been cleaned up, and a third is to have the Department of Education use email and videoconferencing instead of stationing an attaché in Paris. That would save $632,000 a year, the official said.

The official said that about 80 of the targeted programs are new and that much bigger savings are possible through the healthcare overhaul that the president wants.

The $17 billion, however, is only a drop in the proverbial bucket when the federal deficit that's likely to exceed $1.5 trillion this year.

And Republicans quickly pooh-poohed the list, asserting that former President Bush proposed even larger cuts last year -- $1 billion and 30 cuts more, by one accounting.