Budget

A host of contentious issues are setting up a clash between House and Senate on the Defense authorization bill.

Lobbyists are girding for a slew of battles on the farm bill, which will hit the Senate floor in early June.

The federal government risks another downgrade if it fails to come up with a credible plan, credit agencies say.

House Republicans are working to bring a proposal to overhaul operations for the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service to the floor this summer, they announced Friday.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), in a memo sent to GOP lawmakers on Friday, suggested the plan was to bring a Republican postal reform bill to the floor between Independence Day and the August recess.

But Cantor also stopped short of promising a vote on the plan from Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Dennis Ross (R-Fla.).

“We will be working to bring their bill to the floor,” Cantor wrote.

Thirty Republican senators on Wednesday introduced a bill they said would force President Obama to divulge the details of how the administration will implement automatic spending cuts slated to take effect Jan. 2.

Under the terms of the August debt-ceiling deal, a $109 billion cut to 2013 spending will hit due to the failure of last year’s supercommittee to design a deficit plan. Over 10 years, nearly $1 trillion will have to be cut.

Half of the discretionary cuts are to hit defense spending, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the cuts are too deep for the military to bear. Most social safety net spending is shielded, but Medicare provider payments will be hit.

Alan Simpson, a co-chairman of President Obama’s fiscal commission, has lashed out at a California seniors group for criticizing the debt panel’s proposals on Social Security.

Simpson accused the California Alliance of Retired Americans (CARA) of pushing “blather and drivel,” and knocked the group for using the pictures of young people on a flyer.

“What a wretched group of seniors you must be to use the faces of the very people that we are trying to save, while the 'greedy geezers' like you use them as a tool and a front for your nefarious bunch of crap,” Simpson, a former GOP senator from Wyoming, wrote to the group in a letter dated April 7 but sent out this month.

Expiring tax rates, automatic budget cuts and slashed Medicare payments are the main reasons the CBO fears a 2013 recession.

The conference schedule for the event includes sport fishing, yoga, surfing lessons and Zumba dancing lessons.

A leader of deficit hardliners in the House, Rep. Tom McClintock is a thorn in the side of GOP leaders.

Read more...

Rep. Paul Ryan defended his budget, saying it created “certainty for investors" the U.S. wouldn’t experience a Europe-like debt crisis.