The Congressional Budget Office released its estimates March 5 for the cost of President Bush’s fiscal year 2006 budget, showing deficits increasing by $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The CBO report will greatly impact the way the House and Senate budget committees write their FY 06 budget resolutions set for markup this week. CBO, the nonpartisan agency of Congress that regularly estimates the cost of legislation and policies, projects federal deficits would grow by about $200 billion annually for the next decade. It also changed its estimation of the FY 05 deficit to $395 billion and FY 06 deficit to $332 billion. CBO also lowered its estimate of how much the president’s proposed changes to mandatory spending would save in FY 06, to $26 billion from the $38.7 billion cited by the president and for savings in Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance programs from $45 billion to $27 billion — almost half of the amount projected by the White House. Because the president’s budget only considers the next five years, it hides the worst effects of his proposals. Over the next decade, the changes to all mandatory spending proposed by the president, including tax credits, will actually put the government more into debt by $16 billion, not save $70 billion as the president claimed in his budget. Perhaps the most damaging conclusion in the report for the president, coming only two months into his second term, is that he will fail to keep his promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009. CBO projects a deficit in 2009 of $246 billion, fully $40 billion short of his goal. Further, neither Bush’s budget nor the CBO report include many expensive policies likely to be enacted in the future, such as costs for overhauling Social Security ($1 to $2 trillion over 10 years), fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax ($754 billion over 10 years), increases in the cost of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit (hovering around $750 billion over ten years), or supplemental military costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year (currently $82 billion for 2005). Despite this grim forecast, the administration and Republican leaders in Congress are steadfast in their support of making CBO’s projections a reality by extending tax cuts to the wealthy without offsets to pay for them. To that end, the House and Senate will most likely push two sets of reconciliation instructions in their budget resolutions this week, one to deal with reductions in mandatory spending and one to extend expiring tax cuts. (See Congressional Leaders Begin Negotiations on Budget Resolution). In the past, Congress has used reconciliation instructions as a deficit reduction tool — protecting legislation lowering entitlement spending, or raising taxes from being filibustered in the Senate. In recent years, the Bush administration has hijacked this process to fast-track huge tax cuts that are not offset and have consequently caused deficits to soar. It appears this process will be used again during the 109th Congress to continue cutting taxes for the wealthy and spending on programs such as Medicaid that benefit mostly low-income Americans. This misuse of the reconciliation process by a few in Congress is damaging to the federal government’s ability to meet its funding obligations to the American people and should be rejected.