In the debate Friday night, Barack Obama responded to John McCain's idea of freezing federal spending by arguing that "the problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel." Then, on Face the Nation (pdf) on Sunday, he furthered his case: "The president has to make choices, and those choices mean that when you deal with a budget you don't take an axe to it, you use a scalpel. There are programs in our government that do not work..."
Yes, there are. And for the better part of seven years, the Bush Administration has been tallying them and calling on Congress to eliminate them. Here's the list of the Department of Education's ineffective programs , for example.
$3.2 billion isn't a lot of money in Washington, but it isn't chump change either. And guess what, Senator Obama: Congress has been ignoring President Bush's pleas to kill these programs for years. Even though he's used his "scalpel" to go line by line through the federal budget and find programs that don't work, all he really gets to do is wield a hatchet called a veto-for entire appropriations bills that come across his desk. (Only recently has he begun to do so.)
With all due respect, you don't just need a scalpel (nor an axe nor a hatchet); you need a club to beat Congress over the head for authorizing and funding stupid programs. Oh, and you need some thick skin, because you're going to be called all sorts of nasty names when you propose to eliminate fuzzy-sounding programs like "Even Start" and "Reading is Fundamental" and the "Underground Railroad Program," not to mention Senator Kennedy's "Exchanging with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners" (motto: "Whales: The other white meat").
A "spending freeze" might be an empty political slogan, but so is this talk about wielding a "scalpel." Until the president gets line-item veto authority (which would probably require a constitutional amendment), or until Congress gets serious about protecting taxpayer dollars, our federal budget is likely to be overloaded with all manner of wasteful excess. And there's very little that the president--any president--can do about it.
