Snow Sees Spending Slashed in '06 Budget By Peter Szekely WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration will seek to slash government spending next year, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Sunday, but he was less specific than the president in predicting how quickly the deficit would fall. Snow, who was asked by President Bush to stay during Bush's second term after heavy speculation he would be replaced, said the administration's budget proposal early next year would rely heavily on spending cuts. "It will be a tight, disciplined budget with spending under disciplined controls," he said in an interview on CNN's "Late Edition" program. "Everything is being looked at and put under the microscope." Snow declined to say what programs are being targeted or how soon Bush would meet his goal of cutting the deficit in half. But he said the budget proposal for fiscal year 2006, which begins next Oct. 1, would actually reduce current spending on some programs, not just slow their expected levels of inflationary increase, which often passes for budget-cutting in Washington. Bush declared during his re-election campaign that he would cut the federal budget deficit in half within five years, after having mounted successive record shortfalls of $412.55 billion in the 2004 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 and $377.14 billion in fiscal 2003. The government had a budget surplus when President Bill Clinton left office in 2001. Bush has blamed the deficits on the 2001 recession, the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the U.S. military response, but Democrats charge that Bush's tax cuts also helped widen the gaps. Snow declined to predict the size of the budget gap for fiscal 2005 and on at least two occasions during the interview he opted not to specifically echo the administration's five-year deficit cutting prediction, saying instead that Bush was committed to halving the gap in "the next few years." In a separate interview on "Fox News Sunday," Snow also said the gap would be halved "over the next few years." As recently as Dec. 9, White House budget director Joshua Bolten said the administration was on "a very clear path toward meeting and, in fact, exceeding the president's goal of cutting the deficit in half by (fiscal year) 2009." Bush's goal is based on an outdated $521 billion deficit projection for 2004 which was derided by critics as inflated, a charge Bolten denied.     Continued ... Quelle "Snow Sees Spending Slashed in '06 Budget" : reuters.com Main page for "Snow Sees Spending Slashed in '06 Budget"