President Bush often speaks about not spending federal dollars on programs that do not get results. In fact, in his State of the Union speeches in 2005 and 2006, he referred to a list of programs he was proposing to be reduced or eliminated because they did not produce results. And each year, on Friday after the budget was released, the Office of Management and Budget released a huge document detailing each of those programs the president wanted reduced or eliminated - just in time not to make it into papers or the public's consciousness.

Well, this administration is nothing if not consistent. Late on Friday, the same document "Major Savings and Reforms in the President's 2008 Budget" was released to little fan fare (although the always feisty GovExec.com did release a good summary).

The list of programs compiled by OMB is of little value other than using it to chastise the administration for attempting to use their biased PART mechanism to justify canceling programs they have long disliked. As we have noted, in past years, only one-third of the president's hit list of programs were even reviewed by the PART to begin with. While the administration has now reviewed pretty much every federal program with the PART, my guess is the list this year is much the same as it was in the previous two years. Just like I said - they are nothing if not consistent.

We did not have a lot of good things to say about the president's FY 2008 budget last week (see here, here, here, and here), but there was one thing that was worthy of praise.

Back in 2006, in addition to continuing to criticize the Program Assessment Rating Tool, we criticized changes OMB made to the publication of their PART analyses and data sets. OMB launched a new web site that year called www.expectmore.gov that had very nice looking summary pages for each PART rating. At the time the web site was unveiled, it appeared the more extensive data sets and spread sheets that OMB had previously publish on the PART - and that we used extensively in our analyses - had disappeared.

But this year, OMB has made some new improvements to the web site that include moving the "assessment details" link from the bottom of the web site where they were impossible to find to the top of each PART rating page and making the larger PART spread sheet files available for download (in CSV format). These are excellent improvements, especially for analysts.

In addition, OMB had announced before the budget was released that they would voluntarily be publishing Agency's budget justifications documents that are formulated for the congressional appropriations committees each year. Whether this was in response to our work last year to pass a law requiring those documents be made public or because the good folks over at OMB just thought it best is unclear. Regardless, the justification materials will be available sometime this month on ExpectMore.gov. Give OMB some credit for actively publishing government information without being prompted.

Kudos to OMB on these improvements - acts where government actively opens up and releases information are hard to come by these days.

Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed a cloture petition and filled the amendment tree, limiting debate on the must-pass FY 2007 CR. GOP Senators, dismayed by the $3 billion cut in BRAC in the House version of the CR, seem unmollified by assurances from Reid and Appropriations chair Robert Byrd (D-WV) that the funding would be restored in the upcoming $100 billion-plus supplemental war spending bill, which is not subject to spending caps.

No go, says Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchision (R-TX), who demands an opportunity to offer an amendment adding back the $3.1 billion, and proposes to offset it with a 0.73 percent across-the-board cut in all other programs, exempting defense, homeland security and veterans.

Echoes Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), in today's Congress Daily PM:

If you want to be considered the party of fiscal responsibility and transparency, this is not the way to do it. If they want to increase spending by that much, be honest about it.

GovExec.com reports:

"[Homeland Security] has been one of our persistent access challenges," Walker testified. "When you have more lawyers in a meeting than program people, you know you got a problem. Something needs to be done about this," Walker said. "There needs to be an understanding that if the general counsel's office is going to get involved, it's clearly got to be the exception rather than the rule," he added. "Right now the system is structured to delay, delay, delay ... We haven't had a situation where they refuse information but it might take months to get it."

Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner confirmed Walker's testimony, saying it sometimes took his office weeks or months to get documents and responses to investigations. Let's hope Congress will be following up on these reports.

OMB Watch has released a preliminary analysis of the President's FY 08 Budget request.

President's Budget Full of Cheap Rhetoric; Wrong Priorities
President Favors Tax Cuts for the Wealthy over Domestic Needs

Check back here for additional analyses and commentary on the budget as the week progresses.

In the $2.9 billion budget for FY2008 he submitted to Congress today, President Bush takes a tentative step toward increased transparency by actually including details about military costs in Iraq in his request for $149 billion for the war (this on top of his nearly $100 billion supplemental war funding request today).

His budget also provides an exit strategy -- out of deficit -- projecting a $61 billion surplus for 2012, sending a strong signal to Congress that he intends to win the battle of the budget and get it into the black.

At the same time, his budget includes only $50 billion for the Iraq war for 2009 and not a penny after that. Not to say that that emboldens the enemy, but the math does seem to raise the question of whether the President has the resources to fight a two-front war, against insurgents in Iraq and deficits in Washington -- or should even be taken seriously about his intentions to fight it.