WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday will unveil nearly $17 billion in additional budget cuts for the coming fiscal year to showcase what a top adviser called a ‘constant effort to find savings at a time when the government’s costs for bailouts, health care and wars are mounting far faster. The savings for the budget year starting Oct. 1 represent the sum of Mr. Obama’s promised ‘line by line scrubbing of the federal budget. But, underscoring the nation’s fiscal plight, the proposed cuts represent about 1.4 percent of the $1.2 trillion deficit that is projected for the fiscal year 2010. The president’s 10-year budget outline, released in February, shows the deficit declining by his final year in office to $533 billion, mostly through assumptions about when the recession will end and the pace of renewed economic growth that many economists consider somewhat optimistic. The $17 billion would be saved through terminating or reducing 121 federal programs, ranging from $632,000 to eliminate the post of an attaché for the Education Department in the American Embassy in Paris to $142 million by ending a program to clean up abandoned mines. But the money for abandoned mines as well […]

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