President Bush presents budget to Congress for debate

WASHINGTON -- President Bush sent Congress a $2.57 trillion budget plan Monday that would boost spending on the military and homeland security but seeks spending cuts across a wide swath of other government programs. Bush's budget would reduce subsidies paid to farmers, cut health programs for poor people and veterans and trim spending on the environment and education.\n"It is a budget that sets priorities," Bush said after a meeting with his Cabinet. "It's a budget that reduces and eliminates redundancy. It's a budget that's a lean budget."\nBush acknowledged that it would be difficult to eliminate popular programs but said programs must prove their worth. "I look forward to explaining to the American people why we made some of the requests that we made in our budget," the president told reporters.\nJoshua Bolten, Bush's budget director, said, "Are we going to get everything we asked for? No." But he predicted Congress likely would accept the administration's broad priorities. He said he entered the upcoming congressional budget battle with a "happy spirit."\nDemocrats immediately branded the budget a "hoax" because it left out the huge future costs for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and did not include the billions of dollars that will be needed for Bush's No. 1 domestic priority, overhauling Social Security.\nBolten said the administration would soon be coming forward with a supplemental request for an additional $81 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that request was reflected in the overall spending projections in Bush's budget for the current year and into 2006.\nHe said including further additional spending for Iraq and Afghanistan "wouldn't be responsible" because it would represent guesses on what will be needed. Bolten also said that even if transition costs for Social Security had been included, the president still would be able to meet his goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 as a percentage of the total economy.\nThe budget would eliminate or vastly scale back 150 government programs. It will spark months of contentious debate in Congress, where lawmakers will fight to protect their favored programs.\nHouse Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California called Bush's budget "a hoax on the American people. The two issues that dominated the president's State of the Union address -- Iraq and Social Security -- are nowhere to be found in this budget."\nThe spending document projects the deficit will hit a record $427 billion this year, the third straight year that the red ink in dollar terms has set a record. Bush projects that the deficit will fall to $390 billion in 2006 and gradually decline to $233 billion in 2009 and $207 billion in 2010.\nBush's 2006 spending plan, for the budget year that begins next Oct. 1, counts on a healthy economy to boost revenues by 6.1 percent to $2.18 trillion. Spending, meanwhile, would grow by 3.5 percent to $2.57 trillion.\nOutside defense, homeland security and the government's huge mandatory programs such as Social Security, Bush proposes cutting spending by 0.5 percent, the first such proposed cut since the Reagan administration battled with its own soaring deficits.\nOf 23 major government agencies, 12 would see their budget authority reduced next year, including cuts of 9.6 percent at Agriculture, 5.6 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency, 6.7 percent at Transportation and 11.5 percent at Housing and Urban Development.