Concocting an "austere" $2.6 trillion budget.

ITEM: The New York Times for February. 8 reported on President Bush's proposed budget: "By any measure, the new budget is austere. It calls for deep cuts next year in almost every category of domestic spending outside the mandatory entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are based on laws adopted in previous years."

ITEM: NBC reporter Norah O'Donnell waxed anxious on the Today show for February 7, saying: "The President is proposing today the tightest budget of his presidency, and it's gonna slash spending ... across a wide swath of government."

CORRECTION: It doesn't take much to be the "tightest" Bush budget--since spending during the Bush years has grown at twice the rate it did under the spendthrift President Clinton. Bush's new budget for 2006 is more than a third larger than 2001 spending, when Bush became president. Spending and deficits have been exploding. As the Washington Post said: "The government spent $2.3 trillion and ran a $412 billion deficit in 2004, compared to $1.8 trillion it spent and the $86 billion surplus it ran in the final full year of the Clinton administration."

The White House, meanwhile, calls its proposed budget for 2006 its "leanest budget yet." This budget, a mind-blowing $2.6 trillion, would pile a 3.6 percent increase in spending on top of the astonishing 33 percent increase during Mr. Bush's first term--and that's assuming the incredible, that Congress will accept the relatively small reductions in the so-called domestic discretionary programs (which represent only 17 percent of the whole budget).

The president's budget would seriously cut or terminate 150 programs. Yet, the budget is so lard-laden that even with these cuts total spending will continue to increase. Moreover, no one knowledgeable about Capitol Hill expects even this penny-ante snipping to occur. It's part of Washington's predictable ritual. The president proposes a few cuts--which riles up liberals, special-interest groups, and the mass media, which exaggerate the potential nicks or slower growth rates. Eventually, the Congress disposes of most of the supposedly draconian cuts.

Last year, for example, President Bush said he wanted to do away with or make major cuts to 65 programs, which would save almost $5 billion. However, as the New York Times noted, "Congress eliminated fewer than a half dozen of them, for a total saving of less than $200 million." Many of these very programs are back again on the supposed cut list, and congressional leaders have already told the White House not to expect to see more than two dozen of the 150 cuts enacted--and that's probably too optimistic.

Even tiny reductions are too much for the leftist media. On CBS, for instance, Lee Cowan (as transcribed by the Media Research Center) bemoaned how "the proposed cuts hit the heartland like a mountain of unwanted news, from the soy bean fields of Iowa ... to large cities like Minneapolis, where block grant programs help the homeless and the hungry."

Do you remember when Republicans said that they were going to eliminate the Department of Education? The GOP leadership certainly doesn't. Spending by the Department of Education has increased by 99 percent during Mr. Bush's first term (though there are proposed program cuts for next year that are already meeting opposition).

Also in the budget are nearly 40 "program increases and new initiatives." The administration, for example, wants $260 million in additional spending for "hydrogen research," research that energy entrepreneurs in the private sector would instead finance--if the government were not doing so and if the research looked promising. And as if there weren't enough domestic boondoggles, Americans can expect to send more of their tax dollars overseas with a proposed increase of $1.5 billion in foreign aid, up 22 percent.

In addition, the true amount of the budget is also understated. The official budget calculations for 2006 do not include more than $80 billion in a supplemental package for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite plenty of military spending, however, that's hardly where all the increases have occurred. During the Bush presidency to date (2001-2005), the non-defense part of the federal budget has increased by 29 percent.

Of course, the budget picture did not look so bad when Mr. Bush first became president, since proposed spending targets for future fiscal years usually end up being exceeded. In President Bush's initial budget, recalled Chris Edwards and Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, he proposed that total spending on education, not just spending for the Department of Education, would be $83 billion by 2005. "The new budget says that 2005 education spending will be $96 billion. Similarly, estimated 2005 spending on agriculture jumped from $14 billion to $31 billion, transportation from $61 billion to $68 billion, and international affairs from $21 billion to $32 billion."

A frugal president would resist congressional squandering. Yet George W. Bush has become the first president since James Garfield not to cast a single veto (and Garfield didn't live out his term). Recently, though, the president did threaten to use his veto pen--if Congress reduced any drug benefits in Bush's prescription benefits plan whose decade-long estimated costs have already mushroomed from $400 billion to $724 billion.

To repeat: The president is not threatening a veto over too much spending, but over the possibility of not enough--while the mass media provides cover by lamenting about his "austere" budget.