Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's government formally adopted a basic policy Friday to suspend part of the supplementary budget for 2009 in order to swiftly work on his promise to re-prioritize the spending plans of his predecessor's budget.
The government also decided to set up two key bodies soon that the Democratic Party of Japan has advocated creating — an Administrative Reform Council and the National Strategy Office, which will later be turned into a National Strategy Bureau — to begin acting on the goal of asserting greater political control over the bureaucracy.
At a Cabinet meeting, Hatoyama told ministers to review all spending projects earmarked in the extra budget to see which should be suspended and to report the results to a Cabinet committee by Oct. 2, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano told a news conference.