$5B Separates Reid and Boehner

The Washington Post reports:

Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill say they are about $5 billion apart in their haggling to reach a deal to fund the federal government for the rest of the year.

That amounts to 0.005 of the trillion dollars in spending Congress doles out each year.

Five one-thousandths.

Yet weeks of negotiations have not led them to an agreement. A flurry of activity Thursday, including two Oval Office sit-downs with President Obama, did not close the gap, or even cool the rhetoric. Each side continued to accuse the other of playing politics, and of trying to force a government impasse.

The only question on the minds of everyone in the capital — Will a shutdown happen? — is now being asked with increasing urgency. If the two sides cannot come to terms by midnight Friday, Washington will effectively run out of money and the government will close.

With no deal in sight, agencies began preparing more than 800,000 federal workers nationwide for that possibility, letting them know whether they should show up for work on Monday morning if a shutdown occurs.

There appeared to be a disconnect Thursday between the overheated gamesmanship that took place in front of the cameras and the calmer negotiations occurring out of view.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) pushed for a deal that would include about $39 billion in spending cuts. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and President Obama have pushed to keep the reductions to about $34 billion, aides in both parties said.

But aides privately said that disagreements about money are no longer really the issue. Negotiators have identified an array of spending cuts, enough to meet Boehner’s and Reid’s demands — if they can agree on which of those cuts to make.

Publicly, Boehner and Reid continue to argue over Republican demands that any deal include restrictions on abortion funding and environmental regulations. Democrats oppose them. Privately, both sides acknowledge that these may turn out to be bargaining chips that the GOP will ultimately remove from a final agreement in exchange for deeper cuts or other concessions.

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