Big Federal Budget Cuts Coming

The budget that President Obama will release next week reflects scores of “tough calls” that cut deeply into programs that the president supports, in keeping with his proposed five-year freeze on a broad category of domestic spending, according to the administration’s budget director. 

In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Sunday, the director, Jacob J. Lew, gives three examples of those calls: proposed cuts for programs that support community organizers, a job the president once held; that clean the Great Lakes; and that finance community development. Together, they would save $775 million.

That sum would not be a major reduction in an annual deficit that is projected to exceed $1 trillion in the fiscal year 2012, which starts on Oct. 1. Mr. Lew did not disclose the total savings for the cuts Mr. Obama intended to propose in the budget, which he is scheduled to send to Congress on Feb. 14. Read more at the NYT