Following up on my previous post about President Obama’s spending freeze, I have two additional observations/questions:

1) My earlier post noted that President Obama’s FY2010 budget already called for non-defense discretionary spending reductions and freezes for the next three years, so it’s not news that he would be freezing that spending. It’s been pointed out to me that the freeze does not apply to all non-defense discretionary spending (which was requested to be about $687 billion this year), but only to “non-security” discretionary spending, which would presumptively also include Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and (arguably) the State Department. Fine. But even if you subtract those agencies’ budgets from the $687 billion in this year’s non-defense discretionary spending, you still get a much larger budget than the $447 billion that the White House is reportedly freezing. So my honest question is, what other agencies’ budgets are the White House classifying as “non-security” and, therefore, not subject to the overall freeze.

2) No matter what the answer to the previous point, the larger point still stands: This “freeze” is not news. If anything, the fact that they’re walking back their earlier plans to cut and freeze overall non-defense discretionary spending for the next three years should be the story. Because since the White House is now only planning to cut and freeze the “non-security” agencies’ budgets, that means they were previously planning on cutting the security agencies (in order to increase the non-security agencies and still maintain the overall cuts), or freeze everything.

If a White House official wishes to explain this contradiction to me directly, I’d gladly post their explanation.

Tags: Ambinder, budget, obama, White House