Were House Republicans fooled on budget deal?

Washington Post: "Cuts of $38 billion include accounting gimmicks, target Obama priorities"

But some of the worst-sounding trims are not quite what they seem, and officials said they would not necessarily result in lost jobs or service cutbacks. In several cases, what look like large reductions are actually accounting gimmicks.

The legislation includes $4.9 billion from the Justice Department’s Crime Victims Fund, for instance, but that money is in a reserve fund that wasn’t going to be spent this year. Crime victims would receive no less money than they did before the deal.

The bill contains some policy provisions, including language preventing Guantanamo Bay detainees from being transferred into the United States for any purpose. And it eliminates funding for four Obama administration “czars”: the “health care czar,” “climate change czar,” “car czar” and “urban affairs czar.” But those positions are already vacant, and Democrats beat back a GOP effort to defund other “czar” positions. . . .

Of the $38 billion in overall reductions in the budget that funds the government for the rest of the fiscal year, about $20 billion would come from domestic discretionary programs, while $17.8 billion would be cut from mandatory programs. The latter cuts, known as “ChIMPS,” affect permanent programs protected by law. The money they lose this year could be put back in their budgets next year. . . .

The cuts that are occurring leave the government agencies much larger than they were before Obama was elected. They just slightly cut the huge increases that Obama put in place.

In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency, long a target of conservatives, will see a $1.6 billion cut, representing a 16 percent decrease from 2010 levels. At the Department of the Interior, affected agencies include the Fish and Wildlife Services ($141 million cut from last year), the National Park Service ($127 million cut from last year) and “clean and drinking water state revolving funds” ($997 million cut from last year). . . .

Other cuts involve money that just shows how sloppily it was allocated to begin with.

Another cut, $3.5 billion for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, would affect only rewards for states that make an extra effort to enroll children. But officials with knowledge of the budget deal said that most states were unlikely to qualify for the bonuses and that sufficient money would be available for those that did. . . .

The Associated Press: "Budget tricks helped Obama save programs from cuts"

The historic $38 billion in budget cuts resulting from at-times hostile bargaining between Congress and the Obama White House were accomplished in large part by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.
Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs - Pell grants for poor college students, health research and "Race to the Top" aid for public schools, among others - from Republican knives, according to new details of the legislation released Tuesday morning. . . .
Instead of sharply cutting the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, both agencies would get increases under the legislation as they gear up to implement last year's overhaul of financial regulation. . . .

More on Obama's broken promises:

As a candidate, Obama promised to deal with the exploding deficit — so committed to tackling the underlying issue of entitlement reform that he told The Washington Post he’d make the “hard decisions … under my watch” shortly before his inauguration almost 27 months ago. . . .

He set up a blue-ribbon deficit commission last year — even promised its report wouldn’t gather dust on the shelves — then promptly distanced himself from it. His State of the Union speech mentioned debt reduction, but focused on stimulating job growth and funneling new funding to education, infrastructure development and green energy projects. And he adopted a political strategy that seemed to be based on Republicans making the first move on presenting a plan for the deficit.

That’s all changed. Last week’s release of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s controversial plan to privatize Medicare and a looming vote to raise the debt limit has forced the White House to unveil its own plan in a speech planned for George Washington University Wednesday afternoon. . . .

A senior administration official told POLITICO that Obama’s speech would break new ground, and not simply serve as a forum for Obama to restate his previous arguments for addressing the deficit.
But the expectations aren’t high for a highly specific proposal, likely to be more a white paper than a spreadsheet. . . .

So what will Obama propose on Wednesday?

White House officials were tight-lipped about specifics, but experts say the proposal is almost certain to focus on using key elements of his health reform law to cut costs for Medicare and Medicaid, drawing the contrast with Ryan’s plan to replace public programs with private vouchers. . . . Obama also is expected to target wasteful health care spending, redundancies and fraud, a mainstay of all reform plans for years. . . .

The problem is that the Medicare cuts before have simply be to eliminate "fraud" by reducing reimbursement rates. Of course, then the Dems turned around and tried to restore the cuts in another bill. Obama also has had a very bureaucratic notion of waste in health care, not acknowledging that eliminating pain can be a good reason for medical care.

From the Financial Times:

Debt disaster behind US budget squabble
After a ramshackle budget and being brought to the brink of shutdown over trifling disagreements, the world had better start paying attention to the US government's inability to govern.