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MARCH 14, 2001

Responding to questions about proposed budget cuts, President Bush on Tuesday said it will be up to each agency head to decide if layoffs are necessary.

"That's going to be up to the Cabinet secretaries to make sure that the levels of employment meet the goals," said Bush. "Our budget doesn't contemplate layoffs across government. It does do what I said in the campaign, that we've got to understand there is a huge middle layer of bureaucracies, and as people retire, we ask our Cabinet secretaries not to replace them, but to lean out their operations to use the new technologies of the 21st century to make their departments run more efficiently."

Secretary of Interior Gale Norton says she doesn't anticpate layoffs in her 80,000-employee department. An employee watchdog group, however, says some 2,000 jobs in Colorado are at risk due to the fiscal year 2002 4 percent budget cut.

Specific details about the Interior budget won't be avaiable until early April.

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