The best thing we can say about the Bush administration's proposed 2009 budget that tops $3 trillion, produces a huge federal deficit and makes deep cuts in programs important to rural America is that it belongs to a lame- duck president.

Chief among those deep cuts were several regional water projects in South Dakota that would have their budgets eviscerated by Bush's budget.

The president recommended zero dollars for FY2009 for the Lewis & Clark Project Regional Water System in eastern South Dakota and he would seriously curtail funding for the Mni Wiconi Rural Water System, a long-overdue water pipeline in western South Dakota. Lewis & Clark would see federal funding levels fall from $26.5 million in 2008 to nothing at all in 2009. Mni Wiconi would drop drastically from the $28.1 million that Congress appropriated for FY08 to $16.2 million in FY09.

Luckily, those numbers will not be the final story for water projects here.

President Bush's political clout in negotiating the next fiscal year's budget is waning as fast as his term in office. That's good news for South Dakota, and good news for its congressional delegation, too.

All three - Sen. Tim Johnson, Sen. John Thune and Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin - expressed dismay at the Bush budget, and all three vowed to get funding restored to the water projects. No doubt, all three will claim credit when congressional committees find some or all of the necessary funding for rural water needs, as most people expect to happen.

Lewis & Clark is designed to serve 300,000 people in three states, but the federal government's promised share of that infrastructure funding is past due. Mni Wiconi has struggled annually for the federal dollars needed to deliver good, drinkable Missouri River water to about 51,000 underserved residents of the Oglala Sioux Nation and other parts of western South Dakota.

Both projects deserve adequate funding. But both are perfect examples of the domestic programs that will be sacrificed - along with rural health needs, educational programs and many other domestic-spending needs - to finance a defense budget that has bloated to $649 billion.