One Week Budget Deal Necessary to Avert Shutdown, Aide Says

With a Friday midnight deadline to avert a shutdown of the federal government a Republican aide said in a published report that there will not be enough time to pass a six-month agreement and a one week extension would need to be approved.

Staffers will not have enough time to turn a permanent agreement into a bill, an unidentified Republican aide told Reuters on Thursday.

The aide said that while House and Senate negotiators had agreed to a large portion of cuts, they were disagreeing on the overall size of the package.

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday that would not be an acceptable solution.

Instead of solving this crisis the way we should - instead of saying 'Yes' - they're going to pass what they'll call another short-term stopgap measure. They'll say it's 'short-term,' but what that really means is shortcut - a shortcut around doing our jobs. Instead of solving problems, they're stalling and procrastinating, he said.

That's not just bad policy - it's fantasy. We all heard the President say yesterday that he won't accept anything short of a full solution.

On Monday the Republican chief of the the House Appropriations Committee introduced a one-week budget stopgap funding measure. It contains $12 billion in cuts to discretionary spending and funds the Department of Defense for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year.

The House has not voted on the measure yet.

Defense Sec. Roberts Gates told troops during a visit to Baghdad, Iraq on Thursday about the effect of a possible shutdown.

First of all, let me say you will get paid, he said, to a unified response of Hoo-ah! by the soldiers, according to a transcript of the talk by the Defense Department.

He said if a government shutdown started on Saturday, and went on for a week you'd get half a check.

If it goes from the 15th to the 30th, you wouldn't get a paycheck on the 30th, but you would be back paid for all of it. So that's the deal, he said.

He said he hoped the shutdown would not happen because I know it will be an inconvenience for a lot of troops.