Obama may propose community grant cuts

In a New York Times op-ed on Sunday titled “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us,” Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, writes that two large tax cuts, a plan to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit with no way to pay for it and the recession have combined to force the president to take serious measures to reduce projected deficits of $10.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

The president and his staff have had to “look beyond the obvious and cut spending for purposes we support,” Lew wrote.

One such cut involves community service block grants, which are given to states to pass on to community action organizations across the country. The grants help poor people with “life’s basic necessities,” Lew explained. “These are the kinds of programs that President Obama worked with when he was a community organizer, so this cut is not easy for him. Yet for the past 30 years, these grants have been allocated using a formula that does not consider how good a job the recipients are doing.”

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-may-propose-community-grant-cuts-2011-02-06?siteid=rss&rss=1