Pelosi, Mcconnell make headway on US budget

WASHINGTON — Washington negotiators are closing in on a budget and debt deal that would stave off a government shutdown this fall and allow Congress to speed through legislation to increase the government’s borrowing cap.

The emerging two-year framework would satisfy demands for an outline to guide congressional work on more than $1.3 trillion in agency operating budgets. It would still need to be fleshed out in follow-up legislation, but it puts off battles over political landmines like immigration and President Donald Trump’s unfulfilled promises of a border wall.

The chief advocates of the deal include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., along with top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York. Many House conservatives are likely to oppose it as spending too much on Democratic domestic initiatives and ignoring budget deficits estimated at $1 trillion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, focused chiefly on the need to increase the debt limit, is the chief negotiator for the Trump administration.

Pelosi and Schumer spoke with Mnuchin on Wednesday, and the talks have gotten down to timing issues. Pelosi told reporters that “if we’re really going to do this by next Thursday before we leave, we have to have some agreement this week.”

Also driving the negotiations is the threat of cuts averaging 10% to agency accounts, reversing recent gains for the Pentagon and hard-won increases in domestic programs favored by Democrats. Those cuts are the final leftovers of a failed 2011 budget and debt deal negotiated by former President Barack Obama and then-speaker John Boehner that used the threat of the automatic cuts to try to prompt additional progress on the deficit.

The talks have so far been insulated from Washington’s ongoing maelstrom and the already raging presidential campaign. It is not a done deal yet. Both sides worry that Trump could still reject it.

Failure to increase the government’s $22 trillion debt cap would spark an unprecedented crisis in which the government couldn’t borrow enough cash to pay all of its bills.