The president’s budget is often viewed as a blueprint for Congress as it crafts a federal spending plan for the coming year. Given the dissatisfaction expressed by Maine’s congressional delegation at President Bush’s document, released last week, it is a blueprint for what not to build. Instead, they must work with their colleagues to develop a budget that better reflects the priorities of Maine and the country.

The list of things the delegation, and others, say President Bush got wrong in his $3 trillion spending plan is long. His cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are too large. He is shortchanging the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, health research, small-business development and veterans care. Even while putting more money toward homeland security, it is not in the right areas. His not including the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget is dishonest. Putting more oil into the country’s strategic petroleum reserve at a time of record high oil prices is expensive and harming consumers. Extending tax cuts will benefit the wealthiest Americans while adding to the budget deficit.

About the only thing they liked in the budget was the $3.5 million for the Machias River conservation project and the $2 billion for climate change research.

“The president’s plan places the burden of balancing the budget too greatly on the least fortunate among us,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe, a member of the Finance Committee.

Among the most damaging cuts is the president’s proposal to reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending by nearly $200 billion over the next five years. This comes on top of rule changes, the earliest to take effect March 1, that reduce or eliminate federal matching funds for services provided through the states.

Maine’s commissioners of Health and Human Services and Education announced last month that the state faced $45 million in reduced Medicaid funding in 2008 and 2009. Communities, including schools and service providers, which would in many cases still be required by federal law to provide these services, would see a reduction of more than $140 million. The first change would disallow federal payments for targeted case management – the coordination of medical, social and education services to help Medicaid recipients live in a community setting.

The funding level the president proposes for LIHEAP in 2009 – $2 billion – is the same as the funding level in 2001, even though home energy prices are now 65 percent higher than in 2001.

The budget would freeze funding for child care assistance for low-income families for the seventh consecutive year. Adjusted for inflation, child care funding has fallen by almost 17 percent since 2002, while the number of low-income children has grown by more than 8 percent.

While funding for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by $3.5 billion, grants to states and cities for homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighters and other first responders would be cut by $1.5 billion, or 45 percent.

Now that many lawmakers know this is not what they want, they must come up with a blueprint of their own that accurately accounts for the war on terror, preserves needed services and does not recklessly add to the national debt.