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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Behind closed doors, Bush and his Republican allies are devising a federal budget for 2006 that ignores those most in need in order to make their tax cuts permanent.
May 28, 2004 | At a White House meeting in November 2002, President Bush asked his staff: "What are we doing on compassion?" The president got no response but silence, recalls former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and he quickly dropped the subject.
Now we are learning the true and profoundly dismaying answer to that question.
What the Bush administration has been "doing on compassion" is to play merciful and bountiful at political photo opportunities while concocting plans for devastating budget cuts and irresponsible tax cuts. As Bush himself warned his advisors at the same meeting, he didn't want to "slam the door in the third quarter of 2004," meaning in the months before Election Day. But behind closed doors and on Capitol Hill, he and his Republican allies are fashioning policies that reserve whatever compassion they can afford for those least in need.
According to a report in Thursday's Washington Post, the White House budget office recently issued guidelines to federal agencies currently planning for the 2006 budget. Those guidelines require substantial spending cuts for almost all domestic programs aside from homeland security, although that supposed Republican priority will be cut as well. Spending on education, so often promoted by Bush as the hallmark of his domestic agenda, would nearly eliminate last year's $1.7 billion increase. The highly successful Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program would lose more than $100 million, leaving many poor families without assistance. Head Start, another successful program that provides early childhood education to deprived children, is slated to lose $177 million, or 2.5 percent of its total budget.
With the cool cynicism that is their trademark, however, Bush and members of his Cabinet pretend to support such "compassionate" programs on the campaign trail even as they continue to attempt to cut those same budget items. As the New York Times noted on May 19, "many administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply."
So the White House regularly trumpets generous grants to help insure the uninsured, to provide heart defibrillators, to improve rural health care and to train minority physicians and dentists -- without acknowledging that President Bush sought to slash or eliminate those same programs in his last budget, and that his upcoming budgets will neuter those programs and many more.
