WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders and the Obama administration are close to a crucial budget deal that would modestly increase domestic spending over the next two years and raise the federal borrowing limit.
The accord would avert a potentially cataclysmic default on the government's debt and dispense with perhaps the most divisive issue in Washington just days before Speaker John A. Boehner is expected to turn over his gavel to Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.
While congressional aides cautioned that the deal was far from certain, and the Treasury Department declined to comment, officials briefed on the negotiations said the emerging accord would call for cuts in spending on Medicare and Social Security disability benefits.
The Treasury Department has said that the government would default on its debt if the statutory borrowing limit was not raised by Nov. 3. And a temporary spending measure, which kept the government from shutting down at the start of October, will run out on Dec. 11.
The White House on Monday acknowledged that progress had been made in budget talks among top administration officials and Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, but said no final deal had been struck.
"We have worked assiduously to protect the privacy and confidentiality of those discussions," said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, because the negotiators have been operating under the principle that no single item would be agreed to until every issue under discussion had been settled.
"As I stand here today, not everything has been agreed to," Earnest said. "That means, at this point, that nothing has been agreed to."
The prospective fiscal agreement would solve each of those problems, and theoretically could be one of the last spending fights between President Barack Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress before he leaves office at the end of next year.
Rank-and-file House Republicans, in particular, have been resistant to authorizing an increase in the debt limit without some accompanying adjustments to mandatory federal spending programs. They have voiced opposition even as financial experts warned of the potentially devastating economic consequences of a default, and noted that raising the limit merely covers previous expenses and does not authorize any new spending.
Obama has repeatedly said that he would not negotiate over raising the debt limit, and Republican congressional leaders have generally acknowledged that they would be forced to increase the government's borrowing authority one way or another.
Boehner, who announced his resignation last month after years of being hounded by hard-line lawmakers on his party's right, had said he hoped to clear the way for his successor by dispensing with some tough issues. But talks seemed to falter after the majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, abandoned his bid for speaker and House Republicans wrestled with the question of who would lead their deeply fractured conference.
That question was resolved last week when Ryan, the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and one of his party's leading voices on fiscal matters, announced that he would seek the speakership provided his colleagues rallied behind him. They did.
Ryan is set to be chosen as the Republican nominee for speaker on Wednesday and formally installed during a vote on the House floor on Thursday.
An accord to lift the debt ceiling and settle the spending impasse before then would free Ryan to begin his speakership with a clean slate, and potentially empower him to pursue some of the bold ideas he has put forward previously on tax and budget policy that helped catapult him to prominence and led to his being chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2012.