Budget

The two senators bickered as Cruz rose to object to Reid’s motion to appoint conferees to a House-Senate budget committee.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said Monday that a new study by the Heritage Foundation “puts to rest” any idea that the bipartisan Senate immigration bill is fiscally sound.

President Obama's Office of Management and Budget has implemented technical adjustments called for by law that reduce the $85 billion indiscriminate sequester spending cuts to about $80 billion, administration and congressional sources said Monday. 

The $4.9 billion in changes come as a result of Congress enacting a full 2013 spending bill last month. That bill extended stopgap funding for most agencies but contained full appropriations titles for the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and Veterans Affairs. 

Congress added money to some accounts but also cut other accounts below sequestration levels, which hit March 1.

While employees at some federal agencies are already taking unpaid time off, many regulatory agencies are dodging sequestration's cleaver. 

Senate Democrats are moving to farm legislation that they think could bolster several red-state incumbents.

Sens. Levin and Inhofe said "a concrete demonstration" of the cuts may be the only way to halt sequestration.

Budget analysts say a bill from House Republicans could make November the new deadline for a debt-ceiling increase.

The Club for Growth and Heritage Action will demand lawmakers pass a path to a balanced budget in 10 years before raising the debt ceiling.

A majority of people have no opinion about the sequester despite the flight delays that were attributed to it last week, according to a new poll.

Gallup surveyed 1,025 people on April 29-30 and found 52 percent did not know enough about the spending cuts under the sequester to offer an opinion.

Thirty percent of people in the poll said the sequester was a good thing, while 17 percent said it was a bad thing. 

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said Tuesday that it was “literally impossible” for the Pentagon to incorporate $52 billion in cuts under sequestration in its 2014 budget.

Dempsey pushed back against criticism from Republicans, who have argued the Pentagon should have lived by the budget caps set by the sequester in the 2014 budget. The Pentagon requested a base budget in 2014 of $526 billion, $52 billion above the budget caps under sequestration.

Dempsey said that because sequestration didn’t take effect until March 1, the Pentagon wouldn’t have had the time to prepare a completely separate budget for that scenario.