In the wake of reports that President Bush plans to cut spending on education and other domestic programs if he is reelected, education and ed-tech advocacy groups are calling on lawmakers to preserve federal dollars for schools regardless of the outcome of the November elections.

The Bush administration has told officials who oversee federal education, domestic security, veterans, and other programs to prepare preliminary 2006 budgets that would cut spending after the presidential election, according to White House documents.

An internal memorandum from the White House budget office directed federal agencies to assume the funding levels specified in a database first circulated in February. At that time, the White House denied plans to cut education and other domestic programs in fiscal year 2006.

But since then, the Associated Press (AP) obtained a May 19 White House memorandum along with portions of the internal database. The documents came from congressional officials who requested anonymity. The leaks were first reported by the Washington Post.

A spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the documents AP obtained contained routine procedural guidelines that would enable federal officials to begin gathering data about their needs for 2006. The federal government's 2006 fiscal year begins Oct. 1, 2005.

Decisions about spending levels "won't be made for months," said the OMB spokesman, J.T. Young. "It doesn't mean we won't adequately fund our priorities."

The concern about funding levels in fiscal year 2006 "is nothing new to us," said Mary Kusler, senior policy analyst for the American Association of School Administrators. The school administrators' group has been questioning whether the Bush administration intends to cut education spending since the OMB printout first surfaced in February.

"We saw that education was going to take a major hit," she said. But the administration sidestepped the issue at the time, engaging in what Kusler called "election-year politics."

Kusler said it's likely the White House intentionally downplayed the proposed cuts in an effort to shield the president from criticism during his reelection campaign.

"There really is a lot of double-speak going on," she said. "We find it very disconcerting."

Keith Krueger, executive director of the Consortium for School Networking, called the proposed reductions "deeply disappointing."

Don Knezek, chief executive officer for the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), called the proposed cuts "just another piece of evidence that indicates [education spending] is a diminishing priority for the federal government."

Democrats said the papers showed the pressures that a string of tax cuts Bush has won from Congress have heaped onto the rest of the budget.

"The only way we can even begin to pay for these huge tax cuts is by imposing cuts on critical government services," said Thomas Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee.