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Late-Night Deal Averts Government Shutdown

By Jerry Zremski

News Washington Bureau Chief

 April 9, 2011
 
WASHINGTON -- Congressional leaders and President Obama struck a late-night deal to avoid a government shutdown at midnight Friday.

"Americans of different beliefs came together," Obama said in announcing the budget accord in an 11 p.m. televised address from the White House.

Sources told the Associated Press of the deal, which outlines $38 billion in budget cuts for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. The outline also abandons a Republican demand that would have ended Planned Parenthood's federal funding.

GOP leaders dropped that provision in exchange for deeper budget cuts, congressional sources said.

With the deal struck, the Senate and then the House quickly passed a bill funding the government through April 15, giving congressional leaders time to write their longer-term agreement into legislative form.

Details about the deal remained sketchy.

Obama said the budget includes some painful cuts. Still, "we protect the investments we need to win the future," the president said.

Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told them the accord includes the "largest real-dollar spending cut in American history."

All three Western New York House members voted for the one-week measure.

But Reps. Tom Reed, R-Corning, and Louise M. Slaughter, D-Fairport, expressed mixed feelings about the longer-term budget deal.

"While this agreement means real savings for taxpayers, we need to go much further to cure our nation's spending-driven debt crisis and move on from cutting billions of dollars to cutting trillions of dollars," Reed said.

Slaughter maintained, though, that the deal cuts too deeply.

"This victory was not without cost," she said. "I have already seen estimates from well-respected economists on both sides of the aisle claiming the measure we take up next week will cost America up to 450,000 jobs which would be a travesty."

The sudden progress on the budget came at the end of a long day of negotiations in which the key congressional players couldn't even agree on what they were arguing about.

As the Obama administration prepared plans to furlough as many as 800,000 "non-essential" federal workers -- including an unannounced number in Western New York -- Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., earlier Friday offered vastly different assessments on what was holding up a budget deal.

"There is only one reason that we do not have an agreement as yet, and that issue is spending," Boehner said.

But Democrats said the two sides were close to agreeing on cuts and insisted that the side issue about funding for Planned Parenthood was the last obstacle to a deal.

Republicans "are willing to throw women under the bus, even if it means they'll shut down the government," Reid said.

Republicans had been insisting on cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which totals about $330 million a year. The GOP opposition to abortion was central to the party's argument even though the nonprofit -- the nation's largest abortion provider -- is barred by law from using federal funds to pay for abortions.

Instead, the agency receives federal funding for women's health services such as cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

Republicans, however, insist that Planned Parenthood co-mingles its money in ways that guarantee that some tax money goes toward abortions.

"Come on," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told reporters. "Money is fungible."

Planned Parenthood officials, lobbying for their federal funding, reacted angrily over the Republican portrayal of their services.

Countless women get breast cancer screenings and Pap tests for cervical cancer at Planned Parenthood facilities, said Karen J. Nelson, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Western New York.

"As far as we're concerned, what's happening here is that they're holding the budget hostage over women's health care," said Nelson, who was in Washington on Friday to lobby on the funding issue.

President Obama, who canceled a family trip to Williamsburg, Va., as the shutdown loomed, acknowledged the depth of the divisions between the two sides in the budget fight. "They're difficult issues," he said earlier in the day.

That being the case, agency after agency issued plans for furloughing non-essential government workers.

In the event of a shutdown, federal law enforcement officials, including border patrol agents, would have remained on the job, as will air traffic controllers. Soldiers would continue to fight, though their pay may have been delayed.

Veterans Affairs medical facilities would have remained open. Social Security checks would have continued being sent, and Medicare payments would have continued being made.

The Postal Service, which is independently funded, still would have delivered the mail.

Beyond that, though, most federal operations would have ceased under a shutdown.

National parks and historical sites would have closed, as would Social Security offices and many other government facilities.

Anyone filing their tax returns on paper would have been out of luck until IRS employees returned, though computerized processing of electronic returns would have continued.

A long shutdown would have had an especially tough impact on federal workers and the economic recovery, with 800,000 temporary layoffs in an economy that has added 955,000 jobs since November.

How deep the economic impact of a shutdown would have been in Western New York is difficult to judge, because the government did not say how many people would be furloughed in each metropolitan area.

A total of 6,571 people work for the federal government in Erie and Niagara counties, according to statistics released by Slaughter's office. But 5,044 of them work for the Defense, Homeland Security or Veterans Affairs departments, which include agencies with a large number of essential personnel.

Boehner told reporters in the early evening that he still believed a deal could be hammered out.

But at about the same time, the GOP leadership sent out a memo to lawmakers saying: "We'd like to clear up some confusion and relay there has not yet been a deal reached; the negotiations are ongoing."

The nation, meanwhile, watched and waited to see if a budget stalemate would shut down the government for the first time in 15 years.

And after the wait was over, lawmakers breathed a collective sign of relief.

"This is historic, what we've done," Reid, the Senate majority leader, said.

Yet it was only the solution to the easiest budget battle Congress will face this year. Still to come are fights over raising the nation's debt ceiling and passing a budget for fiscal 2012.

"This deal was necessary to get the drops out of the way so we can begin dealing with the entire bucket," said Reed, the Corning Republican.

News wire services contributed to this report.

jzremski@buffnews.com