Of Budgets and Lines

John Kamensky of the IBM Center for the Business of Government has a great blog post up about Obama's "line by line" budget review pledge (which I've commented on before).

Kamensky knows whereof he speaks. He is a veteran of the last effort by a Democratic president to comb through the budget in search of savings. Here's his assessment:

President-elect Barack Obama will soon find out that most of the federal government’s biggest spending isn’t actually in the budget. Going through it line-by-line won’t help much. That’s what I and others found when we were tasked by President Bill Clinton to conduct his National Performance Review 15 years ago. He said “we’ll conduct an intensive national review of every single Government agency and service.” Well, we did that. And we conducted a huge savings review that went beyond agencies and services. We had identified $700 billion in potential savings (in the days when $700 billion was a big number) but only acted upon a fraction of that. What we found was politically too scary to do anything with.