President Obama’s extremely modest budget cuts amount to $17 billion. The Wall Street Journal chips away at that number, though, noting that these cuts are offset by new spending items:

Child nutrition would get a $1 billion increase if Congress enacts the president’s plan. The Education Department would get the new, five-year, $2.5 billion college-access-and-completion fund. Some $330 million would be devoted to train and deploy health-care professionals to underserved, inner-city and rural areas.
The budget would launch a $1 billion effort to develop or rehabilitate affordable housing for the very poor. The national parks would get a $134 million funding increase.
More cops would be put on the beat, not only the traditional kind in cities and towns but regulators at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and agents at the Internal Revenue Service.
The Federal Railway Administration budget would jump to $2.7 billion from $1.8 billion, reflecting Vice President Joe Biden’s push for high-speed rail lines.

That’s about $6 billion right there.

More interesting, perhaps, is what the president is cutting. It’s a time-honored Washington trick to propose cuts that you know will never happen because of congressional resistance. This is done in Congress routinely in order to make room for new spending, but for a president it only has a public-relations value.

And then there’s the question of how you justify a massive $790 billion Keynesian stimulus package, focusing on infrastructure and job creation, when you’re cutting back some of the programs that Obama is using to create savings. This tiny example is mentioned in the journal article:

The president will try to take advantage of the retirements and defeats of lawmakers such as former Sens. Pete Domenici of New Mexico and Ted Stevens of Alaska to eliminate programs they guarded zealously. Road building under Mr. Stevens’s Denali Access System and the Alaska-specific Denali job-training effort would be closed down to save $9 million.

Poring over the administration’s document listing its cuts and terminations, I also noticed what Veronica alluded to earlier. The administration says it plans to save $400 million by terminating the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), which provides to states and localities “a partial subsidy for the cost of incarcerating in State prisons and county jails illegal aliens who have committed crimes.” The $400 million in savings is to be directed toward a border enforcement strategy given the following opaque description:

In place of SCAAP, the Administration proposes a comprehensive border enforcement strategy that supports resources for a comprehensive approach to enforcement along the Nation’s borders that combines law enforcement and prosecutorial efforts to investigate arrest, detain, and prosecute illegal immigrants and other criminals.

It is worth mentioning that when President Bush tried (and failed) to shut down SCAAP last year, the AFSCME union went nuts and demanded a doubling of funds for the program instead:

AFSCME requests funding for SCAAP at $950 million…Funding should not fall below $460 million, which was recommended in the House’s FY 2008 Appropriations bill…SCAAP is important because it reimburses states and local governments for some costs of incarcerating criminal illegal aliens held in state/local correctional facilities. Given that immigration is a federal function, states should not be burdened to pay the full cost to incarcerate criminal aliens. President Bush proposes to terminate SCAAP, which cuts FY 2008 funding by $410 million.