As the Congressional committee charged with reining in the deficit nears its deadline for coming up with a way to cut it by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years, the Tea Party — or at least, a small group aiming to represent the Tea Party — is presenting its own ideas.

The group, the Tea Party Debt Commission, has been soliciting ideas from Tea Party supporters over the past several months, and will release its final recommendations on Thursday, at a hearing on Capitol Hill convened for it by conservative senators and House members.

When it was formed, its organizers said that the commission would prove that the Tea Party, which tends to like the idea of cutting deficits rather than actual cuts, could in fact come up with a specific plan – one with far more ambitious goals than the joint Congressional committee that is supposed to release its recommendations next week.

The Tea Party budget, as the group calls it, claims to balance the budget in four years, and reduce federal spending by $9.7 trillion over the next 10 years, all while making permanent the Bush-era tax cuts.

If this sounds too good to be true, many will argue it is. Some nonpartisan voices, such as the Congressional Budget Office, have disputed the cost savings that the report estimates for things like repealing the health care legislation passed in 2010, which the Tea Party refers to as ObamaCare.

Among the group’s recommendations are things that have long been favorites of conservatives and/or libertarians — it’s a little bit Ronald Reagan, a little bit Ron Paul.

It would, for instance, eliminate four cabinet agencies – the two that Rick Perry remembered (Education and Commerce) as well as Energy and Housing and Urban Development. It would get rid of a host of other programs and agencies, including Legal Services, the Small Business Administration, the AmeriCorps volunteer program and the National Endowment for the Arts.

It casts a wary eye at the Federal Reserve, too, suggesting it should be eliminated. The report also endorses the idea of “competing currencies,” where people could opt out of using federal reserve notes and conduct business in gold-backed notes and precious metal coins instead.

Not surprisingly, it would also repeal the health care legislation “in toto.” The commission’s report argues that this would save more than $1 trillion over 10 years. But the Congressional Budget Office has said that repealing the act would increase the deficit by $210 billion in that time.

Another of the commission’s ideas is to “end all foreign aid to countries that don’t support us,” which it acknowledges is subjective. Commissioners began with the assumption of ending all foreign aid, but then decided that countries like Israel might be deserving of it. It also argues to reduce the number of troops deployed for “certain” overseas military operations to 45,000 by 2015, but does not define which military operations it would end.

The commission also sets up a budgeting-by-popularity-contest feature, where taxpayers could earmark 10 percent of their tax payments each year to three federal agencies of their choice. The money would be a bonus for agencies that people like (though none would get more than a 10 percent top up).

But cuts to foreign aid and even eliminating entire departments are just nibbling around the edges of deficit reduction. The fastest-growing share of the budget is in mandatory entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. With those programs, the Tea Party budget would allow all new Medicare beneficiaries to enroll in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. And it would turn Medicaid into a block grant program – states would get a certain amount of money to spend, forcing them to come up with ways to cut costs.

The commission also argues for allowing workers born after 1981 to invest half of their payroll taxes in a private account, an approach it calls the Galveston or Chilean plan — after a county in Texas and the country in South America, both of which allow similar private accounts.

Rick Perry and Herman Cain have endorsed similar plans on the campaign trail. But the plan in Galveston has actually cost more than Social Security, with the higher cost being borne by the county’s taxpayers. And workers do not rely solely on these plans for retirement income: they are also enrolled in pension and 401(k)-type programs.

Some of the commission’s other recommendations are also subject to debate. Arguing to “scrap the tax code,” it says that “massive over-regulation is killing this economy.” But a survey by the National Federation of Small Business, which has joined Republicans and Tea Party supporters in fighting the health care legislation, says that the “single biggest problem” facing its members is low sales, not government regulation. And Labor Department data shows that government regulation has accounted for less than 1 percent of layoffs in the last three quarters.

The commission was formed and largely run by FreedomWorks, the Tea Party incubator led by Dick Armey, the former Republican leader in the House. FreedomWorks named the commissioners, who are a dozen Tea Party activists from across the country, and organized field hearings across the country to take testimony. It also sponsored a Web site where people could choose between different potential cuts to the budget.

Many of the final recommendations, especially those around energy policy and private savings accounts for health care, are ones that FreedomWorks was pushing even before the advent of the Tea Party movement in 2009.

The hearing to be held Thursday afternoon is being convened by several Tea Party-inclined legislators, including Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Representatives Joe Walsh of Illinois, Steve King of Iowa and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Adam Brandon, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, said that while the commission has no power, it hopes that lawmakers will incorporate its recommendations into legislation.