Senate Republicans ready to pounce on Obama’s ‘budget gimmicks’

“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.

{mosads}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.