Obama: Budget 'inexcusable' delays An expected meeting between President Barack Obama, House speaker isn't scheduledWhite House and congressional budget negotiations fail to reach an agreementWithout year agreement, the government will shut down after FridayFederal workers paid by appropriated funds would be furloughed in a shutdown
Washington (CNN) - The odds of a government shutdown appeared to grow Wednesday as expected face-to-face budget talks between President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and other top officials were not scheduled.
After meeting with the Republican speaker on Tuesday, Obama declared that he expected negotiators to return to the White House for further talks Wednesday.
And "if that doesn't work, we'll prompt them again the day after that," he vowed. "There's no reason why we should not get this done."
Obama is scheduled to start Washington for unrelated events in Pennsylvania and New York shortly after noon Wednesday.
One White House official said it was still possible for a meeting to be scheduled.
"We're watching the modest progress that was made on the Hill last night," a senior White House official added.
Key Democrats rejected a Republican proposal Tuesday to keep the government running for one more week at the cost of an additional $12 billion in cuts. Republicans, meanwhile, dismissed Democrats' insistence that there had been an agreement to cut $33 billion for the rest of the fiscal year, which expires on September 30.
If there is no deal by midnight Friday, when the current spending authorization measure expires, parts of the government will close down.
Late Tuesday, Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, met privately to discuss the matter. Statements issued by each of their offices described the talks as "productive" and said they agreed to continue working to find a solution.
Reid, however, blasted Republicans during a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday morning, accusing the GOP leaders of being unwilling to compromise.
"We all have a responsibility to be reasonable," Reid said. "at this late stage of the game, reality is more important than ideology."
Unfortunately, he asserted, "The Republican leadership has the Tea Party screaming so loudly in its right ear that it can't hear what the vast majority of the country demands."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, immediately shot back, insisting that Democrats are "rooting for a shutdown."
Republicans would "prefer a bipartisan agreement," he said. But the Democrats are "more concerned with the politics of this debate than with keeping the government running."
Republicans, under pressure from the conservative Tea Party movement for deep cuts that would reduce the size of government, blame Democrats for failing to pass a fiscal year 2011 budget last year when they controlled both congressional chambers and say that Obama and his party are ignoring the peril of the rising federal deficits and national debt.
Democrats contend that the $61 billion in spending cuts sought by House Republicans in response to Tea Party pressure would harm the economic recovery and slash education and innovation programs essential for continued growth. Obama and Reid both insist that Democrats have agreed to more than 50% of the spending cuts sought by Republicans, which they said should be sufficient for a compromised on an outcome that has little overall effect on the deficit and debt issues.
The budget brinksmanship shows the political stakes of the situation, with both parties trying to depict the other as unwilling to do what's right for the country.
Obama said Tuesday he could support one more short-term funding extension to avert a partial shutdown, but only if a deal is reached on spending for the rest of the current fiscal year.
He and Reid rejected the GOP proposal for a seven-day extension that would include $12 billion in spending cuts while providing the military with funding for the rest of the fiscal year, but Reid added he would consider amending the measure if it reached the Senate in time for action before the current spending resolution expires.
Democrats consider the $61 billion in spending cuts passed by the GOP-controlled House to be draconian. They have complained that, among other things, it would cut key programs for continued economic recovery while eliminating funding for others opposed by conservatives, such as Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio.
Boehner, meanwhile, has insisted House Republicans won't let Senate Democrats and the White House put them "in a box" by forcing them to choose between a government shutdown or continued government funding with insufficient spending cuts.
The speaker insisted Tuesday that the GOP would continue to push for "the largest spending cuts that are possible."
Boehner also said he would not drop the GOP's insistence on including provisions relating to hot-button social issues such as abortion, calling them important to his conservative caucus. Democrats opposed the so-called "policy riders" in the spending bill.
The speaker cast aside assertions by Obama and Reid that they had already given the GOP more than half of what it initially wanted in terms of cuts, saying the Democrats were using "smoke and mirrors to get there."
"our goal is to keep the government open," Boehner insisted. "We have no interest in the government shutting down, but we are interested in cutting spending."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management posted on its website Tuesday information about how a shutdown would affect federal employees. The posting said that most federal workers paid with funds appropriated by Congress would go on temporary furlough in the event of a shutdown.
It would be up to Congress to decide if furloughed workers get paid for the work time missed when the shutdown ends, the posting said. Health benefits continues if the shutdown lasts for less than a year, it said.
A senior Democratic source with knowledge of the ongoing negotiations said the biggest obstacle to a deal involves whether reductions in mandatory spending programs, known in appropriations parlance as "changes in mandatory spending" or CHIMPS, should be part of spending cuts.
Examples of mandatory spending programs include Pell Grants, the Children's Health Insurance Program and some types of highway funding. Such programs are funded for multiple years at a time, with the spending set for the time period covered, free from congressional authorization each year.
According to the senior Democratic source, the chiefs of staff to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Kentucky, negotiated throughout the weekend, and the gap between them is about $8 billion to $10 billion.
Democratic sources said they want about half the overall cuts in this spending bill to come from mandatory spending programs, and they have proposed the necessary reductions in programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Justice Department and the Treasury Departmentand in Pell Grants.
Republicans, who want any spending cuts to reflect a reduction in the size of government, noted that reducing the spending in a mandatory program for one year doesn't prevent the amount from returning to its original level the following year.CNN's Dana Bash, Deirdre Walsh, Ted Barrett, and Kate Bolduan contributed to this report.
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