Well, I guess it's better than the $100 million he asked his department heads to trim a couple of weeks ago.

But $17 billion cut from a $3.4 Trillion budget is still a microscopic amount. Congress sneezes and spends $17 billion on Kleenex.

But the truly weird part of this story is the president of the United States instructing journalists how to report this story.

Brian Montopoli of CBS News quotes the president giving instructions in how to spin the miniscule budget cutting efforts of his administration:

As Steve Chaggaris noted in Hotsheet's morning bulletin today, the news that the cuts totaled $17 billion "landed with a bit of a thud" in the media. Reporters stressed that the cuts made up "a tiny fraction" of the total budget and that they would be hard to push through; USA Today noted that the "proposed cuts are about one-fiftieth the size of this year's $787 billion economic stimulus package - all of which was added to the deficit."

In his remarks today, the president sought to change that tenor of that coverage. He mocked the notion that smaller savings are considered "trivial" in Washington and stressed that "these savings, large and small, add up."

And he told journalists directly that they should stress the fact that the cuts are "significant" - a surprisingly direct appeal to reporters concerning which angle they should take in their coverage.

"It is important, though, for all of you, as you're writing up these stories, to recognize that $17 billion taken out of our discretionary, non-defense budget, as well as portions of our defense budget, are significant," he said. "They mean something."