I knew the House Republicans couldn't be trusted managing the federal budget. But I had no idea it was this bad.

To great fanfare a group of House Republicans has announced what they call Operation Offset, an effort to make up for new Katrina spending and save the president's tax cuts by proposing a whole slew of new cuts in the federal budget. As we noted below, a huge amount of the cuts come out of Medicare. And there's also a very timely cut in CDC funding.

But if you go to page 17 of the 'Operation Offset' budget plan they're circulating, you'll see they propose to "eliminate attache positions in the Foreign Agricultural Service." And by this they claim they'll get more than $37 billion of savings just next year. $347 billion over ten years.

Who knew attaches made such high salaries!

If you look down into the explanation section, it notes that the savings are in millions, not billions, on this and the item below on cuts at the Department of Education. Yet, they push this transcription error through the whole document. So about half a trillion dollars worth of savings they claim doesn't even exist.

(ed.note: Special thanks to sharp-eyed TPM Reader TW.)