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While we publish a weekly Washington Budget Report (sign up here), we wanted to direct your attention to some other budget items we are watching this week.

• The Senate is considering a McCaskill/ Sessions (amendment text here) that would institute statutory discretionary spending caps for three years.

• Senators Coburn and McCain will offer amendments to provide...

The extenders bill that the House will consider this week is a timely reminder of why it is important for Congress to complete action on a budget resolution.  A budget resolution continues to elude Congress, but there has been considerably less trouble reaching agreement on a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will add a staggering $167 billion to the deficit over 2010-2014 and a net increase of $134 billion over 2010-2020. 

Last Thursday, leaders of the Senate...

President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission will hold its first meeting on April 27. It has two very ambitious assignments -- find a way to balance the budget excluding interest on the debt by 2015 and “meaningfully improve” the long-term fiscal outlook. All of this is supposed to be done by December 1, 2010.

That’s quite a task. It may even be too much to ask. So here is a simple suggestion for the commission: Leave the short-term goal to the regular budget process and focus on the more important long-term goal.

Finding long-term solutions to the nation’s unsustainable fiscal outlook is what originally motivated members of Congress to propose a statutory commission. Only when that effort failed did the President step in by establishing an executive commission with the added goal of filling a gap in his budget.

The short-term budget goal could easily distract the commission from its long-term mission. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a commission member, had it right when he told POLITICO last week, “I don’t think a commission should be absorbed with the short-term budget. We need them to focus on long-term structural problems.”

Simply determining which baseline to use in assessing the required deficit reduction in 2015 would get the commission bogged down. They can’t know what it...

According to a March 29 Roll Call article (subscription required), Senate Republicans have gone home for the two-week congressional recess with a strategy memorandum advising them to call for repeal of “Medicare cuts, tax hikes, mandates and sweetheart deals” in the new health care reform legislation.

Leaving aside the sweetheart deals, repeal of the other three items would amount to a fiscal catastrophe. One can legitimately argue that the law will end up costing more than anticipated or that some of the proposed savings will fail to materialize. Claims of big deficit reduction do indeed rest on some shaky assumptions, and the law certainly leaves a lot of work to be done on fiscal sustainability. However, the surest way to guarantee exploding deficits would be to leave in place all of the popular insurance reforms and repeal the politically difficult choices that have been made to pay for them.

Expanding health insurance coverage costs money. Unlike the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, this plan at least attempts to pay for its new spending by cutting future Medicare costs and raising new revenues. Constituents may not like these things but they are essential parts of the law. They are also protected by...