WASHINGTON — President Bush will propose a 2006 budget Monday that, despite record spending of about $2.5 trillion, will call for billions of dollars in cuts that will touch people on food stamps and farmers on price supports, children under Medicaid and adults in public housing.
Even before the budget is officially sent to Congress on Monday, resistance to Bush's proposals was welling up Saturday from interest groups that benefit from federal aid and from the members of Congress who represent them.
Powerful agricultural interests were among the first to label Bush's proposed budget cuts as unfair and shortsighted. Farmers receive about $15 billion annually in federal farm program payments to help produce major commodities, including corn, cotton, rice and wheat.
California farmers could end up bearing a disproportionate share of the burden if the cuts in crop subsidies were enacted, said economist Daniel Sumner. "Rice and cotton are very important to this state," said Sumner, who is director of the Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis.
The cuts are being proposed as the president is striving to keep a campaign promise to rein in government spending and halve the federal deficit in five years. The deficit has soared since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war on terrorism -- and as revenue has fallen as the economy has slowed and tax cuts have taken effect.
In addition to the cuts proposed in the 2006 budget, Bush is expected to ask Congress to approve in principle many billions of dollars in additional, unspecified cuts.
Bush has seemed to challenge congressional Republicans and Democrats to make the tough choices necessary to achieve the deficit reductions that members on both sides of the aisle have called for recently.
"I welcome the bipartisan calls to control the spending appetite of the federal government," he said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "On Monday, my administration will submit a budget that holds the growth of discretionary spending below inflation."
Deficit hawks outside the government welcomed Bush's tone but warned that members of Congress would fight to maintain spending for programs popular with their voters.
"It's going to be a tight budget," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group that lobbies for smaller deficits. "That doesn't mean it's going to be a realistic budget."
