WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday unveiled nearly $17 billion in additional budget cuts for the coming fiscal year to underscore what he called an “ongoing” effort to find savings at a time when the government’s costs for bailouts, health care and wars are mounting far faster.
“We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits do not matter and waste is not our problem,” said Mr. Obama, who was joined at the White House by Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Rob Nabors, his deputy. “We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration — or the next generation.”
The savings for the budget year starting Oct. 1 represent the sum of Mr. Obama’s promised “line by line” scrubbing of the federal budget, and the the proposed cuts amount to about 1.4 percent of the $1.2 trillion deficit that is projected for the fiscal year 2010.
Administration advisers called the cuts just a beginning, but some Republicans said they were less than impressed.
“While we appreciate the newfound attention to saving taxpayer dollars from this administration, we respectfully suggested that we should do far more," said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.
The president’s 10-year budget outline, released in February, shows the deficit declining by his final year in office to $533 billion, mostly through assumptions about economic growth when the recession ends and which many economists consider somewhat optimistic.
The $17 billion would be saved by ending or reducing 121 federal programs.
Mr. Obama listed some of them: a long-range radio navigation system that costs $35 million but has been rendered obsolete by global positioning systems; a literacy program that spends half its financing on overhead, and will be absorbed by other Education Department efforts; and the position of education attaché to UNESCO, based in the United States Embassy in Paris.
“Participation in UNESCO is very important,” Mr. Obama said, “but we can save this money and still participate using e-mail, teleconferencing, and a small travel budget.”
The the 131-page budget document released Thursday showed spending in 2008 of $77,000 to rent living quarters for the attaché, and $21,000 for travel expenses, and the president noted that eliminating the position would save $632,000 a year.
An additional $142 million would be saved by ending a program to clean up abandoned mines. But eliminating the financing illustrates the difficulties the administration could face in Congress, where, as administration officials acknowledged, every program has its patrons. When Mr. Obama proposed cuts in the program as part of his budget outline, Western state lawmakers objected.
“None of this will be easy,” he said.
That is certainly true for about half of the savings that administration officials say will come from military programs. The savings proposals, outlined last month by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates as part of a comprehensive reordering of military spending priorities, drew howls of protest from supporters in Congress and the arms industry.
Among Mr. Gates’s targets are missile defense programs, the Army’s costly Future Combat Systems, Navy shipbuilding, the advanced F-22 fighter jets and a state-of-the-art helicopter fleet for the president.
“This is a product of going through the budget line-by-line,” as Mr. Obama has promised since his presidential campaign, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said. “It’s a constant, cumulative effort on this front to find savings and find reductions.”
While the $17 billion in projected savings represents a small portion of the proposed budget, Mr. Obama insisted that “that’s a lot of money, even by Washington standards.” It was enough to pay for a $2,500 tuition tax credit for millions of students, for larger Pell education grants, he said, “with enough money left over to pay for everything we do to protect the National Parks.”
“For every dollar we seek to save there will be those who have an interest in seeing it spent,” the president said. “That’s how unnecessary programs survive year after year. That’s how budgets swell.”
But, he added, “We cannot accept business as usual.”