Washington ? Repeatedly since taking office, President Barack Obama has said his administration was combing through the federal budget “line by line” to root out wasteful spending.

Finding it is one thing, getting Congress to sign on is another. And, by Republican accounts, he hasn’t found that much anyway.

Obama sent Congress a detailed budget Thursday proposing to eliminate or trim 121 programs and save $17 billion next year — not a trifle, for sure, but only about half of one percent of the $3.4 trillion in federal spending for the fiscal year beginning in October.

The size of the savings clearly was a sore subject at the White House.

“It is important … for all of you, as you’re writing up these stories, to recognize that $17 billion taken out of our discretionary, nondefense budget, as well as portions of our defense budget, are significant,” Obama told reporters. “They mean something.”

Still, Obama’s hit list was smaller than the one President George W. Bush included in his budget last year targeting 151 programs for $34 billion in savings.

Bush didn’t have much luck in getting those cuts through the Democratic-controlled Congress. And Obama may run into some of the same difficulties. In fact, he brought back some of the same Bush-proposed cuts for return appearances — including a $400 million-a-year program that reimburses states and localities for holding suspected criminals who are in the country illegally.

That program has been popular with governors and border-state lawmakers. Obama’s own secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, was among officials who petitioned Bush for more money for the program when she was governor of Arizona.

“None of this will be easy,” Obama said, facing cameras at the White House.

Even with the cuts, the White House estimates the government’s red ink will still be about $1.2 trillion, down only slightly from this year’s all-time record.

Republicans scoffed that Obama’s cuts were not nearly enough. “They appear to be a diversionary tactic — an effort to change the subject away from the unprecedented debt this budget heaps on future generations,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio.

The president defended proposed cuts that he portrayed as a mix of some “more painful than others.”

“In Washington, I guess that’s considered trivial. Outside of Washington, that’s still considered a lot of money,” he said. “But these savings, large and small, add up.”

If there was a theme to Obama’s cuts and spending initiatives, it was to continue to provide generous increases to domestic programs that had been squeezed during the eight years of the Bush administration while reviving oft-rejected Bush-era proposals to cut programs that critics say have outlived their usefulness but still have important support on Capitol Hill.

“What we’re trying to do is reorient government activity toward things that work,” said White House Budget Director Peter Orszag.