Budget

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform canceled a planned public meeting set for Tuesday morning as negotiations continue on a draft budget-reduction proposal. 

Co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson of the bipartisan deficit commission will hold a press conference at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday instead, on the eve of the release and expected vote on a final proposal from the group, the panel announced Monday.

The public meeting was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. 

A meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning, when the panel's 18 members are expected to vote on a final plan, is still on, the group said. At least 14 votes are needed to issue a formal budget-reduction proposal to provide Congress with a roadmap on a broader plan to reduce the deficit. 

At this point, approving a plan could be a long shot. 

Representatives of three liberal advocacy groups on Monday blasted President Obama’s proposed two-year freeze on federal civilian worker pay.

John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute, Tamara Draut of Demos and Greg Anrig of The Century Foundation said it is a mistake to freeze pay until the economic recovery from the recent recession has taken hold more firmly.

“We think that is a terrible idea. We should be raising wages,” Irons said in a press call. “It is unclear why the president would want to do this.”

“It reinforces the concern we have that the focus has shifted from creating jobs to deficit reduction. It is far too soon to be doing that. We need to be focusing on ways to lower 9.6 percent unemployment,” Anrig said.

The second-ranking House Democrat said Monday that President Obama’s move to freeze the pay of civilian federal employees should be extended to military personnel as well.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) praised the president’s announcement of a two-year pay freeze, but he said including the military would have increased savings and added “an element of fairness.”

“While I appreciate that the president reduced the length of his proposed pay freeze from three to two years,” Hoyer said in a statement, “it would have produced significantly more savings had that sacrifice been shared between federal civilian and military personnel--with a strong exception for the members of our military and civilian employees risking their lives on our behalf in Afghanistan, Iraq, and anywhere else they are serving in harm's way.”

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The second-ranking House Democrat said Monday that President Obama’s move to freeze the pay of civilian federal employees should also be extended to military personnel.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said including the military would have increased savings and add “an element of fairness." He made the comments in a statement about he president’s announcement of a two-year pay freeze. 

“While I appreciate that the president reduced the length of his proposed pay freeze from three to two years,” Hoyer said in a statement, “it would have produced significantly more savings had that sacrifice been shared between federal civilian and military personnel — with a strong exception for the members of our military and civilian employees risking their lives on our behalf in Afghanistan, Iraq, and anywhere else they are serving in harm's way.”

Hoyer will become minority whip in the 112th Congress. He has made budgetary reform a signature issue, and he said he would review Obama’s proposal “for its balance between fiscal responsibility and the need to recruit and retain a federal workforce able to provide the level of service that the American people expect.”

The Maryland Democrat also urged the administration to back a more comprehensive program to reduce the nation’s soaring deficit, along the lines of proposals from the president’s fiscal commission and a separate debt panel.

The White House on Monday instructed all federal agencies to clamp down on classified information after a third batch of sensitive government documents was released by WikiLeaks. 

"Any failure by agencies to safeguard classified information pursuant to relevant laws … is unacceptable and will not be tolerated," Jack Lew, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a memo posted Monday morning on OMB's website. 

More than 250,000 documents, some classified, from the past three years show conversations between Washington and its U.S. diplomatic corps. Many touch on sensitive issues and include unvarnished opinions of world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

The White House has denounced WikiLeaks for releasing the documents, saying it could endanger national security. It has also opened up the White House to criticism about how so many documents could have been leaked.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the Obama administration's decision to institute a pay freeze for most federal employees is "both necessary and, quite frankly, long overdue."

President Obama is expected to propose a two-year freeze of federal civilian pay.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office today released its latest estimate on the number of jobs saved by the 2009 Recovery Act, even as emboldened Republicans are vowing to rescind unspent stimulus money.

The CBO estimates between July and September, the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million jobs. It is also estimating the unemployment rate decreased during the third quarter of 0.8 percent to 2 percent due to the stimulus act.

These are slightly better numbers than the CBO reported in August when it found that in the second quarter, the act increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.

The new director of the Office of Management and Budget has pledged to take a bipartisan approach to tackling budget deficits.

“I look forward to working — as I have throughout my career — collaboratively across partisan and ideological divides with all those committed to taking constructive steps to rejuvenating our nation’s economy and its fiscal standing,” Jack Lew wrote Tuesday in his first blog posting on the OMB website.

Lew emphasized the need to spur job growth in the short term while tackling budget deficits in later years.

“Now, we must put our nation back on a sustainable fiscal course in the medium-term and shore up our fiscal position for decades to come while spurring job creation and boosting the competitiveness of the U.S. in the global economy,” he wrote.

The Senate on Friday afternoon approved $1.15 billion to fund a long-awaited legal settlement between the Department of Agriculture and black farmers who claimed government discrimination.

The upper chamber also approved $3.4 billion to settle complaints that the Department of the Interior mismanaged Native American money accounts.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) touted one of the first legislative accomplishments of the lame-duck session.

“Black farmers and Native American trust account holders have had to wait a long time for justice, but now it will finally be served,” Reid said in a statement. “I am heartened that Democrats and Republicans were able to come together to deliver the settlement that these men and women deserve for the discrimination and mismanagement they faced in the past. 

“This issue has been of great importance to me, and I am pleased these long-suffering Americans can now receive the closure that they deserve,” Reid added.

The 1999 settlement between the Agriculture Department and black farmers is one of the biggest in civil rights settlements in history.

Black farmers accused the government in a lawsuit of denying them loans in favor of whites.

The Senate approved the measure Friday afternoon by unanimous consent. It includes an extension of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Republicans agreed to pass the measure after Democrats found offsets to pay for it.

A Senate Democratic aide said the cost of the measure will be covered by surplus funds in the Women, Infants and Children nutritional assistance program, reducing overpayment of unemployment benefits and extension of customs user fees.

The House must approve the bill before it goes to President Obama for a signature. The House, which Democrats will control for a few more weeks, is expected to pass it easily.