US Budget: First Glance

I am reading the entire US Budget submitted by the Administration today, it is a big document coming in at 2,400 pages or so, and I will posting a series of articles about what I find. My mission is to see how much I can trim out of the Federal Budget with little or no impact to Government Employment and its services.

The main overview here is the 1.2 Trillion in taxation on the 250,000 a year plus crowd and medium to large businesses, and the implementation of tax credits and exemptions that will do basically nothing for the citizens and companies they are targeted at. I will be discussing those in detail as I assess the impacts. The next take away is the fact that the OMB Forecasts a 1.36 Trillion deficit. The total Budget is 3.8 Trillion Dollars in Federal Spending, so there is a lot to go through.

Quick find for savings was the Environmental Protection Agency a recipient of a doubling of its budget last year and this year as result of the Stimulus Package known as the Recovery and Re-Investment Act of 2009. Here I have identified 7.2 Billion dollars that could be cut without any impact of the core responsibilities of the Agency. This will be the subject of my next post explaining where the cuts are coming from.

I also looked at the NASA budget and identified 0.5 Billion in savings there as well in cuts that match the stated objectives of the Administration in re-focusing on Earth Sciences away from manned exploration. Again the details will be in a future post.

This was a first pass through and already savings are lying right there on top. I think there will be much more and that if I can find the savings then the OMB Accountants should have no problem either, assuming of course that there is a will to actually cut spending, which I doubt.