Today’s Washington Post (I start a lot of entries with that phrase, don’t I?) reports on the actual spending amounts in Bush’s 2004 budget. It turns out that many of the programs he touted, including the fuel cell initiative and battling AIDS, are not funded in the way he proposed. His numbers, which sounded so large, were very misleading.
Yesterday, Bush burnished his green credentials by promoting an initiative to produce hydrogen-powered cars. “I’m asking Congress to spend $1.2 billion on a new national commitment to take hydrogen fuel cell cars from the laboratory to the showroom,” Bush, echoing his State of the Union address, said after examining fuel cell technologies at the National Building Museum.
But a fact sheet distributed yesterday by the White House stated that $720 million of the $1.2 billion is in “new funding.” The rest — 40 percent — is what the government is already spending on fuel cell development.
Democratic lawmakers accused the president of repackaging programs to conceal his preference for expanded energy drilling. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a Democratic presidential candidate, called the counting of existing funds “a shell game,” adding: “Rumors of this administration’s commitment to hydrogen fuel cells are greatly exaggerated.”
On the five-year hydrogen fuel cell initiative, Bush proposes spending $182 million of the $1.2 billion total in 2004. Environmental groups, though backing such technologies, called the plan misleading.
In his [State of the Union] address, Bush proposed spending $15 billion to combat AIDS overseas over five years. He said $10 billion of that would be in new funds.
But his 2004 budget plan called for spending $1 billion — of which $450 million would be new funding, OMB said. The increase was partially offset by a reduced commitment to another foreign aid program. The budget proposal fell about $400 million short of the $1.7 billion that Bush had pledged for his Millennium Challenge Fund.
Read the entire article here.
