European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - May 03, 1978, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page 4 the stars and stripes wednesday May 3, 1978 Zero base budget cuts 25 Job safety Agency positions coast guard eliminates a boating program Washington ii  p  Reu ration stec1�b so which tremendous "2.4 miT"watraecgoem0lal7 Almos mediation team tres. Tended by a settlement tween go nes ate a education and the to Union s. Of plus new programs. They tend to spend the most time and Effort justifying request for the new  idea of Zero base budgeting bbl to justify All programs even those that have been around for years from scratch hence the  importantly Agency officials Are supposed to assign each spending  a rank from the most important to the least important. This amounts to saying which spending project can be Cut first something government officials Are reluctant to do. The report acknowledged some prob lems. Officials sometimes had trouble figuring out what they were supposed to accomplish with the taxpayer s Money. Some officials simply warned higher ups of con sequences of cutting their funds rather than describing How they could get by formless. Most agencies had trouble figuring out what minimum level of Money the could get by on. The report did t attempt to place a Dol Lar value on savings from the first year of Zero base budgeting. We Don t want to oversell this thing said George h Strauss of bomb. But the report did give some examples of benefits claimed for the first year including the trimming of 25 Low priority jobs from the occupational safety and health administration and a recommendation by the coast guard to phase out a pro Gram of assisting states to conduct Safe boating programs. The program bad achieved its objective the report said. Strauss said that review of existing pro Grams in t new but that Zero base budgeting forced officials to do More of it than he said the ranking of spending request by priority was entirely new and had forced High level Agency officials to give much More personal attention to spending matters. Hospitals waste funds study finds As almost . Ben. Herman e Talmadee a a to a news conference Mendiala general accounting office study of nor i ill Fiss map y Many sold mor. A bushmen group a address Tal but expanded itto four