WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans unveiled a spending plan Wednesday that sets up a confrontation between their party's defense and budget hawks and omits a politically polarizing Medicare overhaul championed by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
The first Senate budget proposal written by Republicans since 2006 calls for $430 billion in unspecified savings from Medicare, the health care program for senior citizens, as part of a plan to trim $5.1 trillion in spending and balance the budget in 10 years without raising taxes.
It doesn't include partially privatizing Medicare as does the House plan put forth Tuesday.
Another difference that will make it difficult to reconcile the two chambers' budget plans is that the Senate proposal contains $58 billion in war funding for fiscal 2016, which President Barack Obama requested for next year, in contrast to the $94 billion House Republicans want.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he will propose an amendment raising the amount to $94 billion.
"It has got to spend more on defense than Barack Obama," said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Budget committees.
The Senate budget contains a reserve fund placeholder that allows a deal later in the year to increase defense spending if offsets can be found.
The House plan uses an accounting maneuver to exceed Pentagon spending limits set by a 2011 bipartisan budget agreement. Tea Party-aligned lawmakers will fight to keep those caps in place, while those advocating more defense spending, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said they'll oppose any plan that maintains the limits.
The rise of the Islamic State and terrorism concerns have led more lawmakers from both parties to back increased Pentagon spending. Yet doing so would unravel budget cuts the Republican Party considers its biggest legislative accomplishment unless Congress can find other budget cuts to make.
Democrats in the Senate are likely to block attempts to find savings from entitlement programs or domestic agencies. The bulk of the Senate plan's savings, totaling $4.2 trillion, come from cuts to entitlement programs.
Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a Budget Committee member and ally of Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he doesn't know whether the House and Senate can resolve their differences. He said he realizes the Senate Republicans' majority is at risk in 2016.
"I do think they tend to panic a little bit" by viewing Ryan's Medicare plan as politically difficult, Cole said. "We've passed it four years in a row, maintained and expanded our majority, and I defy anybody to show me a single member of Congress that lost their seat on a budget vote."
There's no clear path to avoiding $35 billion in Pentagon cuts set to take effect Oct. 1.
Both the House and Senate proposals assume $2 trillion in savings from a full repeal of Obama's health care law -- a measure the president has said he would veto.
The budget blueprint also makes clear that Republicans plan to try to unravel the health law if the Supreme Court strikes down federal subsidies in most states later this year. The proposal sets up a fast-track process to revise the law, though the instructions don't require a full repeal.
Both chambers' plans make deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. The Senate budget would save $400 billion by creating block grants for Medicaid and combining that with the Children's Health Insurance Program. Another $600 billion in savings would come from creation of a trust fund for states to manage the welfare and food-stamp programs.
Yet such cuts aren't enough to bring the budget into balance over 10 years. The House plan would cut $5.5 trillion in spending to balance the budget in nine years, and groups that advocate fiscal restraint said that proposal would pursue a number of "gimmicks" to achieve their goal.
For instance, the proposal by House Budget Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., includes about $94 billion for a special war-funding account that isn't subject to the spending limit -- the Overseas Contingency Operations account, which funds military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The defense and domestic spending limits were enacted as part of the 2011 Budget Control Act, intended to cut $1.2 trillion in spending through 2021. Congress voted to ease the spending reductions for the past two fiscal years.
Obama has called for an end to the automatic cuts. His budget plan offered a $38 billion increase for national security programs over current budget caps, and $37 billion more for domestic programs.
Information for this article was contributed by James Rowley and Billy House of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 03/19/2015