Obama Goes Line By Line

President Obama talked a bunch about the line-by-line review of programs his administration is doing at the fiscal responsibility summit today:

To start reducing these deficits, I've committed to going through our budget line by line to root out waste and inefficiency -- a process that Peter and our administration, our team, has already begun. And I'll soon be instructing each member of my Cabinet to go through every item in their budgets, as well. And already we've seen how much money we can save, just in the last 30 days.

Take one example -- the Department of Agriculture has moved some of its training programs online, saving an estimated $1.3 million a year. They're modernizing their financial management system, saving an estimated $17.5 million. They're saving tens of thousands of dollars by cutting back on conferences and travel and other small expenses that add up over time.

So we will replicate these efforts throughout the federal government, eliminating programs that don't work to make room for ones that do -- and making the ones that we keep work better. We'll end the payments to agribusiness that don't need them and eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq. We'll end the tax breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas and we'll stop the fraud and abuse in our Medicare program.

Not to be all Debbie Downer or anything, but the actual identifications of waste Obama cites, rather than the actual changes in policy that he says will save money, are pretty meager. None of these things are tough choices, either; not going to a conference is not a major decision. Moving training online probably has to be done anyway. Modernizations are one-offs, at least in the short term. It'll be interesting to see what happens when--and if--Obama decides to cut a program that wasn't part of his political platform and that still has its adherents.