The conservative National Taxpayers Union and the liberal Public Interest Research Group have co-published a report outlining spending cuts that could reduce the United States’ debt by US$ 600 billion before 2015, Toward Common Ground: Bridging the Political Divide to Reduce Spending. Of this total, the report finds that US$ 62 billion could be saved by scrapping “wasteful subsidies”, including export subsidies, agricultural subsidies and energy subsidies.

The study lists 30 specific programs to be cut, as well as the amount of money each program is projected to cost according to official government sources. Within energy subsidies, they recommend cutting tax credits for ethanol (worth US$ 22.65 billion by 2015), a research program for ultra-deepwater natural gas and petroleum (US$ 158 million by 2015) and the Southeastern Power Administration, which it claims subsidizes energy at below-market costs (US$ 1.2 billion by 2015).
 
The stated aim of the study is to put together a list over which “a consensus… can be reached between political factions that spend a great deal of their time fighting one another” – in other words, finding ‘common ground’ where both liberals and conservatives would recognise spending as useless or even harmful.
 
The report is available from the National Taxpayers Union’s website: http://www.ntu.org/assets/pdf/policy-papers/p10-10-28-ntu-pirg-spending-cut-paper.pdf