Obama's cabinet cuts would equal 1/10,000th of spending

WASHINGTON — President Obama called his full Cabinet together for the first time Monday and instructed department heads to cut enough money from their budgets to set a new "tone" in Washington.

But the target the president set for the cuts amounts to a small fraction of the overall budget, leaving room for critics to question whether the reductions mean much at all.

The president has asked for a total of $100 million in trims, from a budget expected to exceed $3.5 trillion. That would cover 1/10,000th — or less than 53 minutes' worth — of the annual operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.

Secretaries have a month and a half to come up with proposed cuts.

"None of these things alone are going to make a difference," Obama conceded, emerging from the meeting. "But cumulatively they would make an extraordinary difference, because they start setting a tone." If they cut "$100 million there, $100 million here," Obama said, "pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money."

Republicans characterized the target in different terms. A "meager 0.0025 percent," said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Pathetic joke," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

The relatively small savings from those measures have drawn ridicule from Obama's conservative critics, many of whom have criticized his spending plans.

"To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall," Harvard University economist N. Greg Mankiw, a former Bush administration official, wrote on his blog. "How much would he or she announce that spending (be) cut? By $3 over the course of the year — approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year."

"Let's not forget that at the same time they're looking for millions in savings, the president's budget calls for adding trillions to the debt," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

In his first three months in office, Obama has seen his $787 billion economic-stimulus plan enacted and the outlines of his $3.5 trillion budget passed, while overseeing hundreds of billions of dollars in outlays to stabilize the nation's teetering financial system and its imploding housing market.

Meanwhile, administration plans to have the government directly administer all federal students loans, cutting out banks and saving $94 billion over the next decade, have run into bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' blueprint to shift billions in defense spending also has met with a mixed reaction from lawmakers. Obama's proposal to end automatic subsidy payments for big farmers and capping subsidy payments at $250,000 has been derided by farm-state lawmakers.

Today, the Senate Finance Committee will host the first of three round-table discussions on improving health-care services and improving efficiency, another step in Democratic plans to overhaul health care by summer. In the near future, the House panels will begin work on cap-and-trade proposals to reduce carbon emissions. And Congress will be working to fill in details of the president's budget outline.

According to the White House, federal agencies already are trying to trim fat.

At the Agriculture Department, for example, officials have been seeking out potential fraud and improper payments in the farm programs, the White House said. People who receive program payments now will have to provide income information for verification, so that ineligible recipients can be taken off the rolls.

Most employees at the Education Department will have either a laptop or a desktop computer, but not both. The Homeland Security Department will try to get better prices on its supplies by purchasing in bulk.

U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals plan to publish judicial forfeiture notices on the Web instead of in newspapers. The Department of Veterans Affairs has canceled or put off more than two dozen conferences and will use more video-conference in training programs.

Some of those changes are expected to save a few hundred thousand dollars, others a few million.

As government money flows toward projects enabled by the nearly $800 billion economic-stimulus plan, some GOP critics say Obama is missing an obvious place to look for cuts.

"If the administration wants to get serious about cutting waste, it should start by taking a closer look at how millions in 'stimulus' dollars are being wasted on a skateboard park in Rhode Island, bike racks in Washington, D.C., highway studies instead of construction projects in Ohio and programs led by housing agencies that routinely fail audits," Boehner said in a written statement.

Obama acknowledged "a confidence gap when it comes to the American people. And we've got to earn their trust. They've got to feel confident that their dollars are being spent wisely."

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs scoffed at questions about the amount of the requested cuts.

"Only in Washington, D.C.," he said, "is $100 million not a lot of money."

The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed to this report.