An impatient President Barack Obama made a dramatic intervention in a budget row that could paralyze the US government, warning it would be "inexcusable" not to reach a deal before Friday\'s deadline.
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| US President Barack Obama speaks during an unannounced appearance in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House in Washington. |
Obama upped the ante after he met top Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House but failed to break the deadlock and as his administration warned departments to prepare to shutter the government.
"The only question is whether politics or ideology are going to get in the way of preventing a government shutdown," Obama said in an unscheduled appearance in the White House press briefing room.
A government shutdown could see hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed, national parks closed and non-essential services halted when the money approved by Congress for their operations runs out at midnight on Friday.
Shutdowns have unpredictable political consequences and Obama and his Republican foes are playing a high-stakes game with uncertain results.
The last major US government shutdown caused by a political row, in 1995, helped reinvigorate the fortunes of then Democratic president Bill Clinton who was locked in a fierce showdown with a conservative Republican Congress.
Obama\'s Democrats argue that they have already offered 33 billion dollars in cuts from current spending -- a figure Republicans dispute -- but a row is raging over where exactly cuts should be made.
The president, who has ruled out cuts in some spending on education, medical research and on environmental projects, called on all sides in Washington to "act like grownups" saying everybody should give "a little bit" to get a deal.
"It would be inexcusable for us to be not able to take care of last year\'s business," Obama said.
"What we can\'t do is have a \'my way or the highway\' approach to this problem."
Republicans have made deep spending cuts a bedrock principle of this Congress and included deep trims to expenditures on foreign aid and other domestic programs in legislation that has passed the House.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the House is run by Republicans and Democrats have a majority in the Senate, meaning a deal must be made before a budget can be endorsed by Congress.
After Obama\'s remarks, the action shifted back to Capitol Hill and a 40-minute meeting between the leader of the Democratic Senate majority Harry Reid and the Republican House of Representatives speaker John Boehner."The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader sat down privately and had a productive discussion. They agreed to continue working on a budget solution," said Boehner\'s spokesman Michael Steel.
Obama said that if there was no deal by Wednesday, he would get the two leaders and their negotiating teams back to the White House for more talks.
Boehner earlier told reporters that there never had been an agreement between the sides on the 33 billion-dollar figure and accused the White House of using "smoke and mirrors" accounting to get to the number.
"We\'ve made clear that we\'re fighting for the largest spending cuts possible," he said.
On the Democratic side, Reid sought to score a political point by suggesting that the Republican leadership in the House was being stretched by the conservative Tea Party movement that wants dramatic spending cuts.
"I\'m going to do everything that I can... but I hope the Republicans do what the country needs, not what they believe the Tea Party wants," Reid said.
The number two Democratic senator, Dick Durbin, said he could not be sure if Republicans were posturing, or whether they believed a government shutdown was to their political advantage.
"The mind of John Boehner is not one of my topics of expertise," he quipped.
The row over last year\'s budget is Obama\'s most critical test of will yet with Republicans, who seized the House last year, and it comes with the political world buzzing after Obama launched his reelection bid on Monday.
Obama warned again on Tuesday that the slowly recovering US economy did not need the shock of shutdown of the federal government, which accounts for a sizeable share of American economic activity.
A current short-term funding measure, which keeps the government open through Friday, is the sixth since the dawn of the 2011 fiscal year.
Separately on Tuesday, the Republicans unveiled a plan to slash government spending by $6 trillion over the next decade -- setting the stage for a future showdown between the White House and Capitol Hill.