Obama’s budget seeks deep cuts in domestic spending

WASHINGTON — President Obama, who is proposing his third annual budget on Monday, will say that it can reduce projected deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, enough to stabilize the nation’s fiscal health and buy time to address its longer-term problems, according to a senior administration official.

Two-thirds of the reductions that Mr. Obama will claim are from cuts in spending, including in many domestic programs that he supports. Among the reductions for just the next fiscal year, 2012, which starts Oct. 1, are more than $1 billion from airport grants and nearly $1 billion from grants to states for water treatment plants and similar projects. Public health and forestry programs would also be cut.

Home energy assistance to low-income families and community service block grants would be cut in half, and an initiative to restore the Great Lakes’ environmental health would be reduced by one-quarter.

The administration readily concedes, even boasts, that the president will not win any race to outcut Republicans. In the House, Republicans are trying to slash up to $100 billion in the current fiscal year alone before they begin writing their own proposed budget for 2012 and beyond.

But the administration contends that its plan would leave the country in better overall fiscal health than the path Republicans envision. Even as they seek to downsize domestic programs, they would exempt the Pentagon from budget reductions, make permanent all the Bush-era tax cuts that are to expire at the end of 2012 and repeal cost-saving provisions of the health care law.

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