Here's my column from today's Roll Call.

What The Federal Budget Did on Its Summer Vacation

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is going to reveal the proposed Pentagon budget for 2010 on Monday.  Here's what today's Washington Post had to say about what Gates may do.

On the one hand, this makes no sense.

The Obama administration let it be known last week that its detailed budget proposal won't be released until May, at least several weeks later than had been expected.  Revealing the details of the military budget a month or more before the rest of the budget invites it to be taken out of context and, with no other agency or department budgets to look at, for the media to obsess about it.

Here's my "Fiscal Fitness" column from today's Roll Call.

The Return of the Budget Committee Jedi

March 10, 2009
By Stan Collender
Roll Call Contributing Writer

Friday’s very discouraging unemployment report, which showed that 651,000 jobs were lost in February, could make the House and Senate Budget committees far more important and powerful than they have been in decades. If it happens, this would be a shock to the system roughly akin to what fans of “Star Wars” (the movies, not the missile-defense system) would call a “disturbance in the force” as the Budget Committee Jedi return to prominence.

Last November, I titled a post "Dancing with the Budget."  My "Fiscal Fitness" column from this week's Roll Call is a follow-up to what I talked about then.

Obama Proves His Choreography Skills With Budget Rollout
March 3, 2009
By Stan Collender
Roll Call Contributing Writer

You can’t help but admire the brilliant choreography that the Obama administration used last week to release its fiscal 2010 budget.

The Obama budget projected a 2009 deficit of $1.75 trillion.  But that number would have been much lower had the White House used the same accounting tricks and conventions used by the Bush administration.

Follow the bouncing deficit:

The federal government typically moves slowly.  There are, in fact, only a handful of times when Washington makes anything other than an incremental change from what it is already doing.  A decision to go to war is one of the most frequently-cited non-incremental changes; the decision to go to the Moon is another.

It's understandable, therefore, that the Obama 2010 budget, which was released yesterday, was hard for many people to digest: it was a very sharp depature from the budgets and fiscal plans of the past eight years and, although it didn't include a brand name, in many ways it rivals the New Deal and Great Society for its boldness.

There are three reasons why the Obama 2010 budget shouldn't have been that big of shock.

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzag has let it be known that some of the most egregious budget gimmicks of all time will NOT be included in the budget that President Obama will send to Congress this Thursday.

Hallelujah!

The gimmicks that apparently have been banished from the face of the federal budget include:

• The Bush administration's refusal to include the costs of its requests for activities in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget
• Counting substantial additional revenues from the Alternative Minimum Tax even though there was virtually no chance it wouldn't be patched each year
• Not assuming that any additional spending will be needed for natural disasters each year even though hurricanes, tornados, drought, forest fires, etc. were a virtual certainty
• Assuming cuts in Medicare spending by refusing to admit that the law mandating reduced payments for doctors would be waived.
• Not counting the additional interest payments from the increased government borrowing for all of the above.

Hallelujah!

Tomorrow starts a week that, to the extent that news on the economy allows, will be virtually dominated by the federal budget.  Monday is the fiscal summit at the White House.  Tuesday night is the president's address to Congress durng which he'll reveal the big themes and major proposals in the budget.  The budget itself will be released on Thursday.

By Sunday, the summit, speech, and budget will likely be the main topic on all on the talk shows.  Although I haven't yet been able to confirm this, my guess is that the Obama administration will probably try to have its director of the Office of Management and Budget appear on one or more of these shows just to show that, unlike the Bush White House, it is happy to talk about the budget.

One of the biggest questions veteran budget watchers ask this time of year is "What color will it be?"  Only a handful of people usually know, and they typically don't tell.  We generally don't find out until the OMB director takes the obligatory picture with his/her baby at the Government Printing Office.

So here's your chance to play.  What color will it be?

UPDATE: It's dark blue.

The Obama 2010 budget will be released next Thursday, February 26.

This will be the summary, topline document that will allow Congress to begin its own work on next year's budget.  The detailed proposal supposedly won't be released until late March or April.

I was told yesterday that the summary will include 10-year projections.  Although not unprecedented, it is unusual; most presidential budgets show 5-year numbers.

My guess...and it's only a guess at this point...is that these longer projections will serve two purposes.

First, it will allow the administration to say (accurately) that it is being as transparent as possible and not trying to hide the long-term effects of its policies, that is, those that will occur after the typical 5-year window when the costs often explode.