Prioritizing bond and Social Security payments is no replacement for raising ceiling, agencies say.

The White House announced on Thursday that it is launching a competition for millions of dollars in federal funding to create several more manufacturing innovation institutes across the country as part of an effort to add jobs in the sector. 

The Obama administration said it will provide $200 million across five federal agencies — Defense, Energy, Commerce, NASA and the National Science Foundation — to add three more regional manufacturing-focused hubs, which are designed to accelerate the development and use of cutting-edge manufacturing technologies, boost the nation's competitiveness and strengthen state and local economies. 

The White House calls the hubs "teaching factories" that provide education and training to students and workers.

President Obama included a $1 billion request in his 2014 budget to create 15 institutes across the country as part of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI). 

Analysts say Washington focus on debt hurting job creation.

First-time jobless claims continued their descent last week, falling to their lowest level in more than five years and providing another sign that the labor market is healing. 

The number dropped by 4,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 323,000, the best showing since November 2007, a signal that employers are laying off fewer workers, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. 

The four-week moving average, a figure that provides a better trajectory of where the labor market is headed, dropped 6,250 to 336,750.

The two top tax-writers in Congress have taken the next steps in their all-out drive for tax reform — a new website and Twitter handle.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) say the new site, taxreform.gov, and Twitter handle, @simplertaxes, would give the average taxpayer input into the tax reform process.

The two chairmen, "Max and Dave" on Twitter, cast their new effort as the modern-day equivalent of former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski’s request that people send him letters — “Write Rosty” — about their own problems with the tax code more than a quarter-century ago.

Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) was House Ways and Means chairman for the last successful overhaul of the tax code, in 1986, and Camp and Baucus suggested their efforts would help give regular citizens — and not just lobbyists and corporations — access to tax writers.

“The public has a huge role to play, because they’re the ones who have to suffer under this nightmare of a tax code, and its complexity,” Camp said in a joint interview with Baucus on National Public Radio.

European Union officials said a trade agreement must be comprehensive and ambitious to secure support on both sides of the Atlantic.

THURSDAY'S BIG STORY:

Debt-limit check: The House is expected to pass a measure on Thursday that would let the government borrow money above the debt ceiling to pay interest on the debt and continue Social Security benefits. 

Republicans defended the bill on the House floor on Wednesday, saying it provides a way to make sure the government does not default on its debt, which is right around $16.4 trillion, even as it nears its debt limit. 

In that defense, the GOP took a beating from Democrats over comments made by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who argued that the legislation is a part of a “pay China first” strategy.

Boehner said it would mean that bondholders get paid before other creditors, which is much like a corporate bankruptcy proceeding.

"Doesn't it mean, as Democrats have suggested, that you're basically choosing to pay China before you pay U.S. troops?," he was asked by Bloomberg television on Tuesday.

"Listen. Those who have loaned us money, like in any other proceeding, if you will, court proceeding, the bond holders usually get paid first. Same thing here,” Boehner said. 

But House Rules Committee ranking member Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) argued on Wednesday that "the legislation does not raise the debt ceiling." 

"But instead, the bill guarantees that when we hit the debt ceiling, our foreign creditors and the Social Security Trust Fund will be paid in full, while the well-being of millions of Americans, and vendors and people we owe legitimate debts to are left to chance"

Read more...

The acting chief of the IRS told lawmakers on Wednesday that taxpayers would soon start feeling the effect of sequestration, now that the filing season has concluded.

Steven Miller, the acting commissioner, told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that taxpayers calling the IRS for advice would soon be affected by the automatic spending cuts, and that the agency’s ability to collect revenues and battle fraud would also be impacted.

Sequestration, Miller added, will only exacerbate recent cuts in the IRS budget. IRS and Treasury officials say that rolling back the tax-collecting agency’s budget is short-sighted, because a dollar spent at the IRS produces several times that amount in new revenues.

“Without a change in the current budget environment, the American people will see erosion in our ability to serve them, and the federal government will see fewer receipts from our enforcement efforts,” Miller said at the Wednesday hearing. Read more...

The partisan battle over President Obama's Labor Department nominee ran hot again on Wednesday as Republicans used an obscure Senate rule to postpone a committee vote. 

Senate Republicans invoked a procedural rule to delay a vote scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, further ratcheting up tensions with Democrats.  

The rule says that all hearings must begin within two hours after the upper chamber gavels into session, according to a Senate aide.