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There is also a considerable riddling with programs that ultimately saves very little. For example, the budget calls for an overall decrease of $446 million in funding for education, training, jobs and other social service programs next year, even though money for educating the handicapped rises sharply, to $814 million. Funds for public service employment under the CETA program (for Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) are cut by 7%, to $9.6 billion. CETA is supposed to provide jobs and skills for the hard-core unemployed, but numerous cases of waste and corruption have been uncovered in the system. The program was enacted in 1973 and has never achieved its original goals.
Spending on health, mostly to cover the rocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid, is projected to rise by about 9%, to $53.4 billion. It will probably go up much more than that because Congress is not expected to pass Carter's hospital cost containment bill, which would put ceilings on increases in hospital charges.
In spite of the White House preachments about the urgency of the energy crisis, the 16-month-old Department of Energy suffers about the closest to draconian cuts in the entire budget. Spending declines almost 9%, to $7.9 billion, and solar energy research is the only area with significant increases. One of the biggest losers is the strategic petroleum reserve program, which is designed to stockpile oil in underground caverns in case of another embargo. Its money is being cut by 22%, to $319 million. That is probably just as well, because problems have lately developed in, of all things, finding ways of pumping the oil back out of the underground storage sites.
All those reductions and raises are what Carter wants, but what he winds up getting in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 could be wildly different. The President proposes, for example, to cut the agriculture budget by nearly 31%, yet success depends in no small part on the weather. A bumper crop could depress market prices and force up subsidy price support payments, while bad weather could wreck a harvest and force farmers to draw down more government loans than expected.
The whole federal budget is riddled with unknowns and guesses about the future. No one can be sure, for instance, just how much the Treasury will have to spend next year to keep rolling over the national debt of some $780 billion. Next year's budget foresees net interest charges of $57 billion on that debt, but the cost will be considerably higher unless interest rates decline. At present, 90-day Treasury bills cost the Government more than 9% in interest payments, and the budget projects the rate to fall to about 7.6% next year.
In addition, Congress will not go along with all of Carter's proposed slowdowns in spending. Opposition is strong not only to the hospital cost containment bill but also to the President's plan to eliminate the $255 burial payment to the family of any Social Security beneficiary who dies. There is powerful sentiment on Capitol Hill to slow the growth of spending, but budget-slashing fever could subside when legislators face up to hard choices about where to cut.