We must cut out more nonessential government spending and rout out more waste, and we will continue our efforts to reduce the number of employees in the Federal work force by 75,000.

The budget plan I submit to you on February 8th will realize major savings by dismantling the Departments of Energy and Education and by eliminating ineffective subsidies for business.  We’ll continue to redirect our resources to our two highest budget priorities—­a strong national defense to keep America free and at peace and a reliable safety net of social programs for those who have contributed and those who are in need.

Contrary to some of the wild charges you may have heard, this administration has not and will not turn its back on America’s elderly or America’s poor.  Under the new budget, funding for social insurance programs will be more than double the amount spent only 6 years ago.  But it would be foolish to pretend that these or any programs cannot be made more efficient and economical.

The entitlement programs that make up our safety net for the truly needy have worthy goals and many deserving recipients.  We will protect them.  But there’s only one way to see to it that these programs really help those whom they were designed to help.  And that is to bring their spiraling costs under control.

Today we face the absurd situation of a Federal budget with three-quarters of its expenditures routinely referred to as “uncontrollable.”  And a large part of this goes to entitlement programs.

Committee after committee of this Congress has heard witness after witness describe many of these programs as poorly administered and rife with waste and fraud.  Virtually every American who shops in a local supermarket is aware of the daily abuses that take place in the food stamp program, which has grown by 16,000 percent in the last 15 years.  Another example is Medicare and Medicaid—­programs with worthy goals but whose costs have increased from 11.2 billion to almost 60 billion, more than 5 times as much, in just 10 years.

Waste and fraud are serious problems.  Back in 1980 Federal investigators testified before one of your committees that “corruption has permeated virtually every area of the Medicare and Medicaid health care industry.”  One official said many of the people who are cheating the system were “very confident that nothing was going to happen to them.”  Well, something is going to happen.  Not only the taxpayers are defrauded; the people with real dependency on these programs are deprived of what they need, because available resources are going not to the needy, but to the greedy.

The time has come to control the uncontrollable.  In August we made a start.  I signed a bill to reduce the growth of these programs by $44 billion over the next 3 years while at the same time preserving essential services for the truly needy.  Shortly you will receive from me a message on further reforms we intend to install—­some new, but others long recommended by your own congressional committees.  I ask you to help make these savings for the American taxpayer.