Federal budget deal ‘very close’
WASHINGTON — It’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top
Senate Republican Mitch Mcconnell versus hardliners in the White House as lawmakers pursue a deal on federal spending and the debt. And the hardliners, wary of further increases to federal spending, appear to be losing.
Talks between Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appear to be progressing. Mnuchin on Monday told reporters, “I think we’re very close to a deal,” though he cautioned that “these deals are complicated.”
Mnuchin says increasing the
$22 trillion debt limit needs to be done this month to avert any risk of a U.S. default on obligations like bond payments. He said he doesn’t think there will be a government shutdown when the budget year ends Sept. 30, nor does he think “either party or anybody wants to put the credit of the United States government at risk.”
Previous negotiations toward a budget deal had included White House conservatives like Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. But Mnuchin is taking the lead for the administration in the talks with Pelosi, as the speaker doesn’t have a productive relationship with Mulvaney.
Mnuchin and Pelosi spoke again Monday evening.
The talks increasingly hinge on a durable, powerful and familiar political coalition: GOP defense hawks demanding bigger Pentagon budgets and Democrats seeking equal treatment for domestic priorities.
The duo of Pelosi, D-calif., and Mcconnell, R-KY., is a partnership of necessity. The two have a chilly but professional relationship and their interests rarely align. But when they team up — as they did on a government spending deal in February — they are virtually unstoppable. Both have long histories with Capitol Hill’s appropriations process, the painstakingly bipartisan and pragmatic job of annually divvying up the one-third of the federal budget allocated by Congress each year.
Pelosi’s mandate is to increase, as much as possible, the portion of the federal pie going to Democratic priorities such as health care, education, housing and the environment.
Mcconnell played a key behindthe-scenes role in setting up the negotiations and has encouraged Mnuchin’s central role.
He wants a deal that would satisfy his defense hawks and his pragmatic-minded power base on the Appropriations Committee. He also knows that the path to a successful deal goes through Pelosi and is likely to include more money than Mulvaney, a former tea party lawmaker, would like.
The negotiations are closely held but a key concern for Pelosi is getting $22 billion over the next two years to cover the rapidly-growing cost of privately-provided veterans health care.
Republicans say those VA costs should be absorbed inside the
$600 billion set aside for nondefense agencies.
Pelosi appears to be dropping another demand, a $7 billion carve-out to pay for the U.S. Census.