Bush budget trims EPA, boosts education, defense

In this story: Democrats: Budget slights environment White House says plan cuts pork RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush sent his proposed budget for 2002 to Congress Monday with big increases in spending for education and defense and cuts in transportation, agriculture and environmental protection.

The four-inch-thick, $1.96 trillion spending plan sets the stage for a battle royal over the president's proposed tax cuts and budget agenda.

"This budget funds our needs without the fat," Bush told reporters as he convened a Cabinet meeting Monday morning. "It represents a new way of doing business in Washington and a new way of thinking. It puts the taxpayers first, and that is exactly where they belong."

The Bush budget includes the first phase of his signature proposal, a 10-year, $1.6 trillion cut in income taxes, and tries to hold federal spending to 4 percent growth, predicting a $231 billion surplus for next year. By comparison, spending in this year's budget represented an 8.7 percent increase over 2000.

INTERACTIVE Highlights of Bush's 2002 proposed budget     FULL TEXT President Bush's federal budget for fiscal year 2002(PDF format) Documents in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing.   RESOURCE Whitehouse.gov: President Bush's budget blueprint More documents from the White House Office of Management and Budget

As usual, the bulk of the budget -- nearly $1.1 trillion next year -- would go to mandatory entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Education and medical research are among the president's priorities.

The Department of Education would get the biggest percentage boost of any agency -- 11.5 percent -- if Bush's budget makes it through Congress. The proposed $44.6 billion education budget would triple the money available for literacy programs and boost federal spending on elementary and secondary schools.

Bush followed through on a campaign pledge by proposing a big increase for the National Institutes of Health, which would receive an additional $2.8 billion under Bush's plan. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would see an increase of more than $120 million, about 10 percent.

The Pentagon would receive the largest increase in raw dollars, with an additional $13.6 billion slated for a total defense budget of $310 billion. $1.4 billion of that would go toward pay increases and other measures to improve the quality of life for service members.

But Democrats noted that Bush proposes to cut deeply into health care, education and conservation programs "in order to make way for the president's tax cut," said Rep. John Spratt, D-South Carolina, ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

"Once we got the budget today, we found out why it was so long coming," Spratt said.

The House and Senate have already passed competing versions of their fiscal 2002 budget resolutions -- versions that will have to be reconciled in a House-Senate conference later this month when members return from their two-week spring recess.

more details on the budget process

The congressional budget resolution sets the stage for committees in each chamber to begin setting the funding levels for every federal department, agency and program. Their deadline to agree on the numbers is October 1, start of the new fiscal year.

Among the challenges for the House and Senate members appointed to the budget resolution conference will be to close the gap between the Senate's $1.2 trillion tax cut it approved last week and the $1.6 trillion cut the House passed in March.

O'Neill said negotiations between House and Senate members could restore much of that.

"I would expect the final number to be close to, if not at, the president's proposed level," he said.

Democrats: Budget slights environment

Spratt said Bush cuts a "significant sum of money" from environmental protection programs across several Cabinet agencies, including the Interior and Energy departments and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Spending on environmental programs would fall by about $2.3 billion. The cuts include funding to implement the Kyoto global warming treaty and $190 million in research on renewable energy sources.

Interior would be cut from $10.2 billion to $9.8 billion. EPA would lose $500 million under his budget -- a decrease of about 6.5 percent.

Further, Spratt said, Most members of Congress expect spending requests to go up as the year goes on, so "any kind of significant downturn in the economy is going to put the budget back in the red."

But Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill discounted those concerns Monday.

"We're trying to do the people's business, and what we have proposed in budget is what the president and rest of us believe is appropriate for the people," O'Neill said Monday.

Another loser in the proposal is the Agriculture Department, whose budget would be $1.5 billion less than the current year's, a cut of about 8 percent.

The biggest single cut among Cabinet agencies is slated for the Transportation Department, which will lose $2.1 billion under the Bush plan -- about 12 percent of its budget. But Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said much of current spending is for one-time projects.

"When we subtract those one-time fiscal year 2001 projects, then our $59.5 billion dollar budget for the Department of Transportation is up some 6 percent," Mineta said.

White House says plan cuts pork

White House officials portrayed the budget as an attack on "pork barrel" projects. White House aides estimated the budget cuts up to $8 billion in so-called pork-barrel spending and said many of the cuts questioned Monday involve such projects.

"What opponents of this budget want to do is spend more government money," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. "It's the classic formula for how to build a big government."

White House budget director Mitch Daniels said the cuts at the EPA, for example, mostly involve spending on "things that regularly come under the porcine label." He said EPA's core programs would not suffer and that none of the EPA's more than 17,000 employees would lose their jobs.

Despite the $500 million in cuts, EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman said Monday the budget "indicates a strong commitment to the environment."

Bush's budget proposes cuts in several Clinton administration initiatives, notably the Community Oriented Police Services program -- an effort to put 100,000 new police officers on the streets -- which would be cut by 17 percent to $855 million. Some of that money would be redirected to putting officers in schools.

Fleischer said the COPS program was supposed to last only three years. "The three-year commitment has been kept," he said.

Bush spoke Monday only of programs he would boost, including an increase in funding for college Pell grants, $21 billion more for food safety programs and $67 million for a mentoring program for children whose parents are in prison.

He said he would increase funding for child abuse prevention programs by 67 percent and spend $87 million more for additional "front-line" prosecutors. And, he said, he would spend more for a program that buys child safety locks for handguns.

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Senate deals sharp blow to Bush tax plans
April 4, 2001

The White House
 • U.S. President George W. Bush
U.S. Office of Management and Budget
U.S. Congressional Budget Office

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