Lawmakers look to trim Obama budget, deficit

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's budget director praised congressional Democrats Wednesday for their proposed changes to the White House's $3.6 trillion budget proposal, saying the effort advances and protects key White House goals.

Budget director Peter Orszag spoke a day after lawmakers, troubled by projections of ballooning deficits, proposed deep cuts to the budget proposal as the White House redoubled efforts to find support for increased spending on its top priorities.

Orszag said documents offered by the House and Senate budget panels will bolster education and clean-energy priorities while also providing for an overhaul of the health care system.

Orszag also said the administration will look for ways to narrow the difference between what corporate and individual taxpayers legally owe the government and what they actually pay.Orszag aid the task force will be led by Obama economic adviser and former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.

But the focus for many on the Hill is Obama's budget. Key Democrats such as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, said some of Obama's most ambitious ideas must be jettisoned to reduce the deficit, including extending tax cuts of $400 for most workers and $800 for couples that were approved in the stimulus package.

Calling Obama a "forceful advocate," Conrad emerged Wednesday afternoon from a meeting with the president on Capitol Hill and said Obama's main message to Senate Democrats was to "preserve my priorities."

Conrad said that was his goal as he crafted the Senate's version of the budget resolution, which Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the budget committee could vote on as soon as Thursday.

"We have attempted to preserve and I think have preserved the president's key priorities," Conrad said, citing changes to education, energy and health care.

But many of those priorities have come under pressure from Republicans and some Democrats who are concerned about growing deficits. Conrad said that if Congress and the president want to pursue those priorities, they will have to find a way to pay for them.