WASHINGTON - After eight years of administration budget practices that often camouflaged the full extent of federal spending, President Barack Obama is planning to put as many of the expected costs on the books as possible to show the full extent of the challenges facing the country, senior White House officials say.
Obama's first budget, scheduled to be released in broad outline on Thursday, will include money for the Iraq war, the troop buildup in Afghanistan, economic aid and other expenditures at the outset, instead of tucking such costly commitments into separate spending requests that would later go to Congress - a device President George W. Bush often used.
"The president is determined to treat the American people as adults and be straight up about what we're facing and what we need to do to move forward," said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama. "He's completely confident we can do that, but only if we face up to our challenges. You can't finesse the situation we're in."
The new approach, which is likely to be set out in the president's address to Congress tonight, follows up on Obama's repeated campaign pledges to make government more transparent, but it also fits with an immediate political need - to persuade Congress and the public to accept costly and controversial measures to rescue the economy, reform health care, and reshape energy and environmental policies.
Paradoxically, Obama's strategy of piling costs into the budget could also make it easier for him to keep his promise to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term. The economic crisis is driving the deficit so high that, even if it were cut in half by 2012, the overall budget and the amount of red ink could still be huge by historical standards.
In other words: Loading in stimulus spending, war appropriations and other special costs will raise the deficit immediately. But, barring unforeseen circumstances, those costs are likely to be gone or at least sharply reduced by the end of Obama's present term. And, since he has pledged to cut the annual deficit - not the entire national debt - in half, starting with huge deficits now means he can slash spending in his fourth year relative to 2009 and still afford major programs.
