WASHINGTON -- Outgoing House Speaker John Boehner is pressing ahead with one last deal as he pushes to finalize a far-reaching, two-year budget agreement with President Barack Obama before handing Congress' top job over to his successor this week, congressional officials said Monday.
The budget pact, in concert with a must-pass increase in the federal borrowing limit, would solve the thorniest issues awaiting the next speaker. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has received support from many of the House's Republican members ahead of a speaker election Thursday.
A deal would also take budget showdowns and government shutdown fights off the table until after the 2016 presidential election, a potential boon to Republican candidates who might otherwise face uncomfortable questions about messes in the GOP-led Congress.
Congress must raise the federal borrowing limit by Nov. 3 or risk a first-ever default. And the amount of funds the government has available to pay for its operations will run out Dec. 11 unless Congress acts. The emerging framework would give both the Pentagon and domestic agencies two years of budget increases totaling $80 billion in exchange for cuts elsewhere in the budget.
Outlined for rank-and-file Republicans in a closed session Monday night, the budget relief would total $50 billion in the first year and $30 billion in the second year.
"Let's declare success," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Republicans, according to Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., as leadership sought to rally support for the emerging deal.
The measure under discussion would suspend the current $18.1 trillion debt limit through March 2017. After that, it would be reset by the Treasury Department to reflect borrowing over that time.
Negotiators addressed two other key issues: a shortfall looming next year in Social Security payments to the disabled and a large increase for many retirees in Medicare premiums and deductibles for doctors' visits and other outpatient care.
The closely held talks had appeared to be proceeding slowly but took on urgency over the weekend as House GOP leaders looked ahead to a debt limit vote this week that they feared they might not be able to pass as a stand-alone measure.
"Fiscal negotiations are ongoing," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said as he opened the Senate on Monday afternoon. "As the details come in and especially if an agreement is reached, I intend to consult and discuss the details with our colleagues."
Negotiators hoped to officially file the legislation Monday night, but it wasn't clear whether they'd meet that goal.
GOP defense advocates are a driving force, intent on reversing automatic budget cuts. Democrats and the White House are pressing hard as well, demanding increases for domestic agencies on par with any Pentagon increases. The measure is aimed at undoing the automatic cuts, which are a byproduct of a 2011 budget and debt deal and the failure of Washington to subsequently tackle the government's fiscal woes.
"It is past time that we do away with the harmful, draconian sequester cuts," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "We must also ensure that there are equal defense and nondefense increases."
At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest made it clear that a final deal hasn't been struck.
"We have worked assiduously to protect the privacy and confidentiality of those discussions" because the negotiators have been operating under the principle that no single item would be agreed to until every issue under discussion had been settled, Earnest said.
"As I stand here today, not everything has been agreed to," Earnest said. "That means, at this point, that nothing has been agreed to."
Rank-and-file House Republicans, in particular, have been resistant to authorizing an increase in the debt limit without some accompanying adjustments to mandatory federal spending programs. They have voiced opposition even as financial experts warned of the potentially devastating economic consequences of a default, and noted that raising the limit merely covers previous expenses and does not authorize any new spending.
Obama has repeatedly said that he would not negotiate over raising the debt limit and Republican congressional leaders have acknowledged that they would be forced to increase the government's borrowing authority one way or another.
The pending talks focus on setting a new overall spending limit for agencies whose operating budgets are set by Congress each year. It will be up to the House and Senate Appropriations committees to produce a detailed omnibus spending bill by the Dec. 11 deadline. Policy riders on issues such as the Internet and travel to Cuba could trip them up.
Details were sketchy but the tentative pact anticipates designating increases for the Pentagon as emergency war funds that can be made exempt from budget caps.
Offsetting spending cuts that would pay for domestic spending increases included changes to the Agriculture Department's crop insurance program, curbing Medicare payments for outpatient services provided by hospitals and extending a 2-percentage-point cut in Medicare payments to doctors through the end of a 10-year budget. New auctions of electromagnetic spectrum to communications companies and sales of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would provide new revenue.
Negotiators also looked to address the shortfall looming next year in Social Security payments to the disabled and a large increase for many retirees in Medicare premiums and deductibles for doctors' visits and other outpatient care.
Social Security's disability trust fund is projected to run out of money in late 2016. If that happens, it would trigger an automatic 19 percent cut in benefits for 11 million disabled workers and their families.
Congress and the White House have been discussing a temporary reallocation of payroll taxes from Social Security's retirement fund to the disability fund. The move would be paired with changes to the disability program to fight fraud and to encourage disabled workers to return to work.
Officials who described the discussions did so on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential negotiations.
An accord to lift the debt ceiling and settle the spending impasse before then would free the next speaker to begin with a clean slate. If Ryan is elected, the deal would potentially empower him to pursue some of the bold ideas he has put forward previously on tax and budget policy that helped catapult him to prominence and led to his being chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2012.
Ryan played a crucial role in the last major spending deal, which he brokered along with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
The current negotiations were largely conducted at the staff level, involving senior aides to Boehner, McConnell, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and Reid, as well as White House staff members.
Just days are left for the deal to come together before the election to replace Boehner, R-Ohio, who is leaving Congress under pressure from conservative lawmakers angered by his history of seeking compromise and Democratic votes on issues such as the budget.
The deal would make good on a promise Boehner made in the days after announcing his surprise resignation from Congress last month. He said at the time: "I don't want to leave my successor a dirty barn. I want to clean the barn up a little bit before the next person gets there."
Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor, Erica Werner, Alan Fram and Stephen Ohlemacher of The Associated Press and David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times.
A Section on 10/27/2015