Hearing of House Committee on the Budget: The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2006

HEARING OF HOUSE COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET: THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006

February 8, 2005

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Mr. Diaz-Balart. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman,

I am always amazed at what I hear in the press and what I hear even today from my dear friends, the Democrats.

Mr. Bolten, of course, has had to deal with it also all day.

I hear complaints that the deficit is too high, and I share that concern. Then sometimes in the same breath, we hear that the President is not spending enough. You know, it doesn't take rocket science to understand that if you are concerned about the deficit, you either have to raise taxes or cut spending. What is very interesting for me to hear is that the same people who complain about a high deficit then complain about not enough spending by this budget.

I just want to read, Mr. Chairman, something that I got off of an Internet Web page. If you will bear with me, it says the President is committed to ensuring that all domestic discretionary spending, excluding Defense and Homeland Security, does not grow any faster than inflation. Continues on later to say that this person--obviously the President here--discretionary spending proposals will be paid for by freezing or cutting nonpriority programs. It is paid, the priorities--I want to make sure I am not misunderstood here--I may have said the President. No. This was a person who was running for President. Who every single one, as far as I know, of my friends on that side of the aisle supported in the Web page--on the Web page it says what I just quoted.

Yet when the President proposes a budget that actually is very--does just that, all of a sudden it is the sky is falling again.

I guess, Mr. Chairman, to again quote a very popular phrase by a very well-respected Democratic leader, and paraphrasing a little bit my friend, the Democrats--I guess they support restrained spending before they oppose it, and in the same breath.

Again, it is just an amazing thing to me to see, for us to witness here, live on national TV and in person.

Mr. Bolten, thank you for your testimony. I think it has been extremely enlightening. One of the things that a lot of us are concerned about, as well as the President, is to make sure that we protect the American taxpayer and the beneficiaries who are supposed to receive the benefits. And you and the President have implemented a variety of tools to do so, including, again, to look for efficiency and effectiveness in the programs.

One of the most important tools I think that the President has implemented is the so-called Program Assessment Rating Tool, known as PART. It is obviously to rate the effectiveness of the government programs in order to make sure that--to help them form management and spending decisions.

By the way, I want to thank you and others for your leadership there, and others like Clay Johnson who we work with quite a bit, we harass quite a bit.

Did this program, PART, play a role in developing this budget, number one? Number two is how can Congress better utilize that system that you all have spent so much time and effort developing to also do a better job in prioritizing our spending in the future?

Mr. Bolten. First of all, Congressman, I know my deputy, Clay Johnson, has very much appreciated the opportunity to work with you on improving the measures by which the government decides what is working and what isn't. That is our PART program.

What we have tried to do is systematically go through all the accounts in the budget and do an assessment--what are these programs doing, what are they supposed to do, are they meeting their objectives--and apply some neutral criteria to these analyses.

We do that with PART ratings. Those are now ever more integrated into the budgeting decisions we make. In each of the important budgeting decisions that has come up in the course of this administration, we have always asked the question, do we have a PART score; what is it; what is that telling us about the program? For Congress we make those PART ratings available.

So I encourage you and the other members to draw on those ratings as you decide what ought to get funded and what ought not to get funded. There are a lot of tough choices to be made in a budget like this.

Mr. Ford referred to a bunch of them that we have to decide--well, OK, we can fund a little more here, but that means that we have to dial down somewhere else. We have tried very hard to make those choices based on which of the programs is performing best in accomplishing the objective. That is what the PART ratings do, and I thank you for raising it.

Mr. Diaz-Balart. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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