Budget

The Speaker said he is following “regular order” after Democrats accused him of dragging his feet.

President Obama's nominee to be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget easily won approval of the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday

The committee cleared the nomination of Sylvia Matthews Burwell by a voice vote, after the dramatic defeat of the Senate gun bill.

Earlier in the day the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee also cleared the Burwell nomination on a voice vote. 

Although Obama's 2014 budget was pilloried by Senate Republicans last week, Burwell has attracted no real enemies in her confirmation process.

 She served as deputy budget director under President Clinton and can claim credit for helping to balance the budget in the late 1990s.

It appears unlikely that she will face a filibuster as did Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. 

Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who at times has called former Obama budget director Jack Lew a liar, had the opportunity to call for a roll call vote in a committee on Burwell to register an objection but he did not. 

In addition to producing the annual president's budget, Burwell will be responsible for overseeing all federal regulations, hence the Homeland Security Committee vote. 

“Sylvia Burwell is an extremely qualified and exceptional choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget and I am very glad that her nomination was approved by the Senate Budget Committee with strong bipartisan support. I am confident that she is going to do a great job at OMB working to boost the economy and tackle our deficit and debt in a balanced way, and I am looking forward to the full Senate approving her nomination as quickly as possible,” Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement. 

All 17 Democrats on the House Budget Committee sent a letter to Boehner calling for the committee to be created.

President Obama's nominee to be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget easily won approval of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Read more...

Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said Wednesday that he supports a one-year fix to reverse sequestration in 2014.

Levin said at a Senate Armed Services hearing Wednesday that Congress should find a one-year solution to sequestration if a “grand bargain” to avert the cuts could not be reached.

“We simply cannot continue to ignore the effects of sequestration,” Levin said at the hearing, where Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey were to testify about the 2014 budget.

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"Chairman Ryan said ‘we want to have a pre-conference.’ Well you can’t have it both ways," Reid said.

A new economic study claims to have found "serious errors" in a study that fiscal hawks routinely cite when calling for action on the deficit.

For years, policymakers and advocates concerned about the deficit have cited a 2010 study by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that found modern countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio over 90 percent suffer a significant slowdown in economic growth. 

The study has been widely cited in the media and on Capitol Hill during the push to rein in the deficit.

But a new paper from economists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst that attempted to replicate the findings is casting significant doubt on that claim. The study instead argues that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth."

“We want to go to conference when we feel we have a realistic chance of getting an agreement,” Ryan said.

The White House sent its top economic adviser to the Capitol to ease concerns among Democrats about Social Security cuts.