Lawmakers hope for progress on spending caps, border crisis

WASHINGTON — Toplevel talks in a budget and debt negotiation over paying the country’s bills and funding about $1.3 trillion in agency budgets are set to reconvene on Wednesday in an effort to head off a financial train wreck when a series of deadlines hit this fall.

At the same time, a key Senate panel is poised to approve a separate measure for around $4 billion to house and care for immigrant refuges flocking across the U.S.-Mexico border — a long-delayed sign off as all sides work to avert a humanitarian tragedy at overcrowded and inadequate federal facilities in the southwest.

The bipartisan budget talks are aimed at preventing automatic spending cuts threatening the top priorities of both Democrats and Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell are taking the lead, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.

Wednesday afternoon’s talks are intended to set a more orderly fiscal agenda for Congress that would permit relatively routine passage of legislation to set new “caps” on spending bills and drama-free consideration of increasing the government’s so-called debt limit, which is required this fall to avert a market-rattling default on U.S. obligations like bond payments.

Without an agreement, another round of automatic cuts to government spending called sequestration would strike early next year, cutting $70 billion from current levels for the military and $55 billion more from nonmilitary programs.