But it was the proposed cutbacks for Medicare, the huge health insurance program for the elderly, and Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor, that drew the sharpest criticism from leading Democrats.
Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called the proposed reductions "dead on arrival with me and with most of the Congress."
White House budget director Jim Nussle acknowledged that the federal deficit will double from $162 billion in fiscal 2007, which ended last September, to more than $400 billion in both fiscal 2008 and 2009. He attributed the increase entirely to the fiscal stimulus plan that Bush and House leaders have agreed on to help the economy.
The new budget portrays the deficit jump as temporary and shows Washington operating in the black for the first time in more than a decade by 2012.
But independent analysts said that the administration's prediction of vanishing deficits is based on a series of overly optimistic assumptions, among them that Congress will drop its temporary relief from the alternative minimum tax. That levy, originally created to assure that millionaires paid at least some income taxes, is increasingly biting upper-middle-class Americans.
The forecast of deficits ending by 2012 also assumed there will be no more war costs beyond the $70 billion in the new budget.
If, as seems likely, Congress continues AMT relief and war costs follow the least costly scenario advanced by the Congressional Budget Office, Congress' numbers-crunching arm, Washington will still be running deficits in 2012 and 2013.
In addition to omitting what critics see as unavoidable future expenses, the administration seems to have based its deficit predictions on an unusually sunny economic forecast.
The White House estimates that the economy will grow at a 2.7% rate this year, significantly faster than the CBO or many private forecasters predict. According to the administration's own budget documents, that one-point difference could mean a $37.1-billion addition to the deficit next fiscal year and more than a $250-billion addition over the next five years.
When it came to the war, Pentagon officials insisted Monday that next year's costs cannot be known, at least until Army Gen. David H. Petraeus returns to Washington next month to give his recommendations about how to proceed in Iraq.
