Congress, Spending Cuts | featured news

Despite Republican-led calls to strip funding from NPR, public broadcasting emerged largely unscathed in the federal budget compromise hammered out in Congress over the past week.

With a partial government shutdown just minutes away, President Obama and congressional leaders reached a tentative deal Friday night to cut ...

Garbage will pile up in the streets of the capital, the Statue of Liberty will close and families of soldiers at war could struggle to pay the bills if Congress fails to reach a budget deal and the government shuts down this weekend.

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.

Sometimes in politics and legislation, whether you win is less important than how you win....

The House passed the second stopgap spending measure this month, funding the government for three more weeks while cutting $6 billion.

Senate leaders delayed until Wednesday consideration of a bill to fund the government through Sept. 30, as Democrats accused Republicans of reneging on an agreement to stage side-by-side votes on two competing plans to cut spending.

In a bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, Congress passed a measure that cuts $4 billion in federal spending, but it is good only until March 18.