With the conference agreement on the Obama budget coming yesterday, I couldn't help but think: "Maybe Obama has a plan to cut the deficit after all."

President Obama has started a monumental task with several valiant steps. He has committed himself to cutting the budget deficit in half by 2013. Although he curiously began this project by ballooning the gap to more than $1.5 trillion, he has made moves in the other direction as well.

Obama knows that any sisyphusian task begins with small and determined steps; and he has taken it upon himself to lead. The president’s first initiative has been to continually offer nominees who owe back taxes. We are forced to ask ourselves: is he crazy or crazy like a fox?

Maybe the president has a secret plan.

By my count, he has offered no less than six officials with embarrassing tax liabilities. Obama’s approach to tax collection and deficit reduction is one that only a true community organizer could love. He is committed to the ground game, going door-to-door and sniffing out the tax cheats. And his method of extracting of the back taxes once found is ingenious. Instead of going through the lengthy IRS audit process, Obama is simply nominating them for cabinet positions.

This naming-and-shaming technique has already netted the Treasury nearly $200,000. Brilliant!

Tom Daschle: $140,000
Timothy Geithner: $34,000
Ron Kirk: $10,000
Kathleen Sebelius: $7,000
Hilda Solis: $6,400
Nancy Killefer: $947
Total: $198,347

In addition to his tax collection strategy, he called on his cabinet to cut $100 million from the budget in the next 90 days; the equivalent of 13 minutes of federal spending. The president trumpeted his minuscule effort claiming, “One hundred million dollars there, 100 million dollars here, pretty soon even in Washington it adds up to real money.”

This is an odd statement considering the administration mocked the idea that $8 billion worth of earmarks in the president’s budget was worth trimming.

We should all embrace Obama’s small step approach and two things can be done immediately to assist the president in his quest. The first is for Treasury Secretary Geithner to step aside. He is clearly overmatched by the task at hand and his vacancy would allow Obama to offer another nominee who could then pay back taxes and help shrink the deficit.

The second thing that can be done is for the Senate to reject the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius for the position of HHS Secretary. Not because she is unqualified or because she is wrong person for the job, but because the president has committed to doggedly and aggressively cutting the federal budget deficit. The least the Senate can do is come to Obama’s aid and reject Sebelius’s nomination and give him another chance to offer a nominee with an overdue deficit-closing tax bill.

The president is committed to slashing a $1.5 trillion deficit in half; and he knows he is going to need every nickel and every nominee. Keep up the good work Mr. President, you’re almost there.