White House Prods Democrats on Budget

The White House expressed frustration with stalled budget talks and prodded Democrats today to come up with their own plan to reduce the $169-billion federal deficit.

“An agreement was made to simultaneously table proposals. We are ready. They are not,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Alixe Glen said after President Bush’s latest round of talks with the leaders of Congress. “That’s where the level of frustration is coming in.”

Once the Democrats put a package on the table, “we can continue to move forward, probably at a faster pace,” she said.

“I don’t think anybody sandbagged anybody,” Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), the House majority leader, said after the hourlong Oval Office meeting.

Gephardt added: “There may have been some miscommunication about what was supposed to happen.”

“It’s safe to assume that everyone is frustrated. . . . We’ve been at this for 83 days,” Glen told reporters. “I think all sides would have hopes that we would have been a little farther along by this point.”

Gephardt said the two sides will decide “in the next few days” whether to keep negotiating into August or wait until September to put their plans for slashing spending on the table. If they decide to go ahead now, Gephardt said, it could mean keeping Congress in session or calling the lawmakers back from vacation.

“The question is when is the best time to try to put together the final disagreements, to bridge them and then to put a deal before the American people and Congress,” Gephardt said.

If the negotiators wait until September, it will allow Bush and the lawmakers to take their summer vacations without embracing controversial packages of spending cuts and revenue increases.

But pushing the showdown into September would bring the summit negotiators closer to the Gramm-Rudman deadline of Oct. 1, when automatic cuts would be inflicted on most federal programs if Bush and the lawmakers fail to produce their own agreement.