Bush Targets Byrd Program For Elimination

It happens every year _ the president highlights dozens of federal programs he deems useless and uses his budget to try to kill the programs. Quite often, Congress ignores this list.

But this year it got personal. In the fiscal 2009 budget released today Bush is proposing to cut the $40 million allocated last year for Robert C. Byrd scholarships, along with 150 other programs.

Byrd, of course, is the 90-year-old chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who has spent a half century steering tens of billions of federal dollars to his home state of West Virginia. He helped create a federal scholarship program, administered by the Department of Education, in 1986.

And he doesn't take kindly to a lame duck president calling for elimination of this scholarship.

"The president has slammed the door to a college education in the faces of young Americans," Byrd said in a statement. "This is the President who calls for leaving no child behind, but has no problem eliminating a program that helps make the dream of attending college a reality for some of our nation’s most outstanding students."

Bush budget director Jim Nussle, at an afternoon White House briefing, said the administration looks at hundreds of federal programs to "find out which ones are working, which ones aren't."

And clearly, the White House this year thinks the program named after the appropriations chairman is one of those federal programs that doesn't work. Don't hold your breath waiting to see if the Democratic Congress eliminates a scholarship named after one of the towering figures in Senate history.

For a full list of programs the White House wants to kill, check out this table, starting with page seven.