A new report released January 20th by a coalition of environmental and budget watchdog groups details billions in wasteful and inefficient programs that, if cut, could help reduce the national debt.

Green Scissors 2000 targets 77 federal projects and programs, ranging from subsidies to the nuclear and fossil fuel industries to wasteful highway projects. If enacted, the report's recommendations could save taxpayers nearly $50 billion over five years.

The Green Scissors Campaign, led by Friends of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, works to cut wasteful government spending that harms the environment.

Since 1995, the coalition has helped eliminate over a dozen programs, cutting over $24 billion in wasteful and environmentally harmful spending. Last year, for example, the campaign helped eliminate nearly $300 million in wasteful water projects for one congressional district in California.

Programs targeted in Green Scissors 2000 often conflict directly with other federal policies, benefit people or institutions that Congress did not originally intend and leave taxpayers holding the bill.

The new report includes five new issues:

· Deep-Draft Dredging – There is a proposal to make federal taxpayers pay a larger share of the cost of digging deeper navigation channels in harbors. This would be extremely expensive to taxpayers, and potentially stir-up contaminated dredge waste into the water.

· Federal Crop Insurance – This program directly costs taxpayers $2 billion a year and encourages farming on marginal lands prone to frequent losses due to weather.

· Low Frequency Active Sonar – The Navy is developing a sonar system that threatens to harm aquatic mammals to meet a diminishing submarine threat.

· Forest Highways Program – The Federal Highway Administration manages a program that provides money to the Forest Service to pave over forest roads. Cutting this program would save taxpayers $410 million.

· Columbia River Deepening – The Army Corps of Engineers wants to dredge the Port of Portland to a deeper depth. This will cost taxpayers $200 million and stir-up contaminated riverbed sediment.

Programs targeted in Green Scissors 2000 threaten America's future through economic and environmental harm. Cutting them will require political leaders to put aside partisan differences and break from the pork-barrel politics that dominate Washington.

But Green Scissors 2000 offers an important opportunity to spend taxpayer dollars responsibly. Policy makers should seize this chance to help the environment and brighten the nation's fiscal outlook.