In his State of the Union address, President Bush announced his goal of cutting U.S. gasoline use 20% in the next 10 years. After unveiling his blueprint for federal spending, is the Commander in Chief putting up enough money to accomplish that goal?

GW is calling for millions of dollars in new spending to boost development of alternative fuels, chief among them is ethanol.  The administration also is proposing to spend another $1.6 billion in the next decade to boost ethanol production, as part of the farm bill to be written by Congress in coming months. Many industry officials and lawmakers found the Bush plan wanting after sifting through the details yesterday.

"We have long ago given up relying on this president to act boldly to break the nation’s addiction to oil," said Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey (D), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "His rhetoric looks to the future, but his budget proposals are mired in the past."  Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union, concurred: "The rhetoric of the president in the State of the Union doesn’t match the reality of what they’re proposing here [in the budget]. To hear the president, it sounded like a massive effort, and this doesn’t match that effort."

An Energy Department spokesman defended the proposed new spending on alternative fuels, saying it is part of a broader effort to make the U.S. "more reliant on farmers of the Midwest, than on oil sheiks of the Mideast."

At a minimum, the Bush budget looks to offer a down payment on the goal of greater ethanol production. Much of the Bush plan focuses on boosting the range of materials used to produce ethanol, now made principally with corn.

Analysts suggest that increasing production of corn-based ethanol would result only in enough fuel to meet half of the president’s alternative fuel-usage goal for 2017. The rest largely would be accounted for with increased production of so-called cellulosic ethanol, which is made from wood chips and switchgrass, among other things.

In the new budget, the president has proposed to spend $397 million next year on renewable energy projects at the Department of Agriculture, representing an increase of $161 million over what has been proposed for this fiscal year, and a main focus of the spending would be development of cellulosic-ethanol technologies. At the Energy Department, the president is proposing to spend $179 million on the department’s biofuels initiative, an increase of $29 million.