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."

In an attempt to seal his bid to be the next chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) on Tuesday will tell the Republican Steering Committee that the next Congress must “destroy the spending infrastructure” with tough spending caps, according to a draft copy of his PowerPoint presentation.

Kingston is campaigning for the spot against Appropriations ranking member Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). The Steering Committee could vote as early as Tuesday on who gets the gavel.

The centerpiece of Kingston’s pitch to the Steering Committee is a proposal to revive the fixed-target budgetary approach taken in the 1980s under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act.

In the presentation, Kingston says he wants to eventually cap federal outlays at 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). That is below the draft proposal from the chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, who this month proposed capping spending at 21 percent of GDP.

As with Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, Kingston’s proposal would automatically reduce funding through a “sequestration period in which OMB would make across‐the-board spending cuts if Congress fails to achieve the spending caps.”

Kingston would go beyond the 1980s law by exempting only the interest on the debt from sequestration, whereas Gramm‐Rudman exempted for many social welfare programs.

Jennifer Hing, a communications director for Lewis, called the leak of the presentation “premature.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page praised Kingston’s presentation on Monday.

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

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has postponed a hearing exploring the Federal Reserve's recent efforts to boost the economy in order to allow Fed officials to testify.