If form follows function, as the architectural adage claims, then how Congress builds the foundation for spending over the next five years is crucial. When the congressional budget committees this week begin shaping a budget resolution, they will not only propose to cut spending for programs such as Medicaid and Head Start, they will write instructions that could require offsets for entitlement spending but not tax cuts, fast track budgeting that will limit debate on programs important to Maine and, unless they break from the president’s budget, ignore full spending for the war in Iraq, Social Security reform and the likely cost of Medicare’s prescription drug coverage.

Congress is under pressure from the White House to deliver a budget that starts a four-year reduction of the deficit to halve its 2004 total of $412 billion – or at least counts on economic growth to halve the deficit. Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said under President Bush’s budget, federal deficits would drop to only $229 billion by 2010. Even that budget not only ignores major costs but includes cuts to programs such as farm subsidies that have little chance of staying in the budget in their entirety and may be shifted to food-stamp cuts. It also assumes revenues from drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a sneaky way to get a major and contentious policy shift through. If ever a decision required a separate vote, drilling in ANWR does.

There’s much to be said for a display of budgetary restraint, but to do it fairly requires offsetting revenues for both spending and tax cuts, to do it humanely requires protecting programs that help the poor and the elderly, to do it honestly means to account for all probable expenses. That will demand the committees offer fiscal discipline that looks quite different from what the president proposed if for no other reason than discretionary spending outside of homeland security accounts for less than 17 percent of the budget so that even a substantial cut there amounts to little overall.

Yet while providing tax-cut extensions of tens of billions of dollars, the president proposed billions in cuts to domestic discretionary spending in education, labor, housing, health and human services, transportation and justice. More significantly, he has proposed a net $45 billion cut to Medicaid, a nonentitlement program that is the state’s primary means of providing health coverage to the poor. The overall five-year cut to Medicaid is $60 billion with additional spending worth about $15 billion, but some of that new money may be less than useful. Advocates, for instance, complain that the president’s budget includes an added $1 billion for outreach to sign up more children for health care coverage but no new money to pay for those services.

Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins were correct last year to insist that budgetary offsets, known as pay-as-you-go, or pay-go, should be applied to both new spending and tax-cut extensions. Pay-go should be part of the budget instructions this week if the tax-cuts extensions must be included at all – the cost of those extensions through 2015 is approximately $2 trillion, including costs associated with the alternative minimum tax, many times larger than the proposed discretionary spending cuts.

Rather than focusing on cutting the relatively small expenses of programs that help the needy, Congress should act first on the really large drivers of the deficit. The time to begin is while the ground for the budget is still being cleared.