Congress, Federal Budget | featured news

With a midnight deadline looming, the White House and Congress scrambled on Friday to break a budget impasse that threatens to shut down the U.S. government and idle hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

Struggling to avert a government shutdown, Republicans and Democrats each said Wednesday the other would be to blame if compromise talks on the budget fail to produce an agreement.

Congress and the White House veered toward a fiscal collision on Tuesday as the Obama administration rejected a short-term House Republican demand to cut $12 billion now in exchange for keeping the government open for one more week. At the same time, the Republicans’ budget chairman set forth a longer-range blueprint defining a new era of profoundly smaller government and steep tax cuts for corporations and individuals.

Republicans now running the House are barely touching Congress' generous own budget even as they take a cleaver to many domestic agencies....

President Obama wants more control over the country's budget, and plans to ask Congress for it this week.

The U.S. Senate on Sunday approved $447 billion in spending for several Cabinet departments and other agencies for the 2010 budget year -- money needed to fund the federal government after this week.