Senate Republicans ready to pounce on Obama's 'budget gimmicks'

Senate Republicans on Monday morning were already criticizing the Obama administration's budget proposal for fiscal 2013 by saying it relies heavily on budget gimmicks in order to find $4 trillion in budget savings over the next decade.

The administration will release its budget proposal at 11:15 a.m. Monday morning. But Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee said that based on weekend reporting, they expect the budget will overstate the amount of budget savings, in particular by counting savings already enacted by the Budget Control Act last summer.

"Naturally, if the $4 trillion figure is shown to be bogus, then the White House has largely discredited their budget rollout and the message that accompanies it," Senate Budget Committee Republicans said in a Monday email.

Specifically, Republicans said they anticipate that the budget will count budget caps under the Budget Control Act as $1 trillion in new savings, and will also count the pending $1.2 trillion spending "sequester" as additional savings.

Republicans are also blasting what they said would be the budget's $800 billion in war savings, saying that spending on overseas contingency operations is dropping as expected, and that this drop should not be counted as new savings.

Elsewhere, Republicans also believe the budget will assume that federal reimbursements to Medicare physicians will not be cut, even though this new spending will not be offset.

The official release of Obama's budget will be followed almost immediately by Republican press conferences, and a week's worth of hearings in the House and Senate on the budget proposal.

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