Congressional and White House negotiators went home Monday night without the roughly $6 billion in offsets to sign a final fiscal 2000 budget deal, although they appeared to have an agreement on International Monetary Fund debt relief language and had made significant progress on all but a handful of smaller issues.
Leaving for the night, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, told reporters: "We made some progress, but we're still in a position where we do not have a deal on offsets. ... There is no way we'll reach a final agreement tonight."
Stevens also said he was told that separate talks among House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers had yielded an agreement to expand the IMF's capacity to grant debt relief to impoverished countries, but had no details.
Armey, an IMF critic, was seeking assurances that the practice would not lead to overall increased resources for the agency. Negotiators are expected to reconvene Tuesday to finalize the more than $6 billion in offsets needed to pay for the five remaining FY2000 spending bills without tapping the Social Security surplus.
House Appropriations ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., said the White House had presented its proposed offsets Monday evening, and that as talks wrapped for the day, there were still several open items, primarily over legislative or report language.
"I hope we can get to closure on it tomorrow or the next day," Obey said as he left late Monday. Obey said it was "still pending" whether Senate Appropriations ranking member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., would get his provision to allow mountaintop removal mining, although House Appropriations Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., and a White House official both said it would not be included in the five-bill package.
Offsets still on the table include one that would raise roughly $2 billion by reauctioning wireless communications spectrum licenses of some Internet start-up companies that have filed for bankruptcy. Another would raise about the same amount by moving the last military pay day of FY2000, which falls on a Saturday, to the following Monday and therefore into FY2001.
Depending on when a final deal is struck and the conference report is filed, there are a number of procedural obstacles that could still stall the process. GOP aides said the House and Senate would likely take up another continuing resolution Wednesday, noting that time would be required for the president to sign a final package even if a deal is wrapped up immediately.
In the Senate, filibuster threats by a few Democratic senators could scuttle Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's plan to schedule a prompt vote on the budget package. Senators with lingering objections could require a lengthy reading of the conference report on the Senate floor once agreement is reached.
If leaders seek to file cloture to overcome a filibuster, it would set the process back two legislative days, and senators would be entitled to a certain amount of debate time after that point. These factors could combine to keep the Senate in through the week, and perhaps through Saturday, even if a deal is completed.
Once a deal is finalized, House leaders are pushing for speedy passage of the appropriations package and a tax extenders bill. The House could try to adjourn for the year once its business is completed, but both chambers must agree to any adjournment resolution, and House GOP aides say it would be a risk to leave without a final Senate resolution in sight.
But even with a budget deal in hand, House leaders may have to keep members here with little to do while the Senate slogs through the process. House Republicans and Democrats plan to meet separately Tuesday to discuss the budget endgame.
In a development that should remove the filibuster threat from Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., negotiators agreed to add more than $500 million in emergency disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Floyd. Of that amount, about $215 million would be distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to relocate people out of the flood plain, and $300 million would be additional loan guarantees to hard-hit farmers.
The parties also had not completely closed their reported deal for the administration to accept GOP restrictions on international family planning groups' lobbying abroad in return for payment of approximately $1 billion in outstanding arrears payments to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, Armey Monday said a package of so-called tax extenders, expiring business tax credits, would be considered after the spending bills are done.
He indicated Republicans are continuing to insist on a five- year extension of the research and development tax credit along with relief from the alternative minimum tax.
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