Biden: ‘Good Progress’ on Budget Talks, Parties Working Off ‘Same Number’

ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe reports:

Vice President Joe Biden emerged from a closed-door meeting with Senate Democrats Wednesday evening to report that lawmakers are making “good progress” on the budget talks and are now “working off the same number” of spending cuts, but that the composition of those cuts still is being discussed.  

“I think we’re making good progress. We’re all working off the same number now, $73 billion,” Biden told reporters on Capitol Hill.

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos earlier reported that negotiators from both parties were focused on a number and working toward a tentative deal.

If both parties cannot agree on a deal to fund the government for the remainder of the current fiscal year, then the government will shut down at the end of next Friday, April 8, but Biden said it should not come to that.

“There is no reason why, with all that’s going on in the world and with the state of the economy, we can’t reach an agreement and avoid a government shutdown, because the bottom line here is we’re working off the same number now – it’s about how,” he said.

“The Democrats are in full agreement on what we don’t want to do in that number," he added. "We don’t want to eviscerate the ability of the economy to grow, so we’re going to have a real debate and the negotiation between the appropriators is going on. I’m not going to get into any detail of that.”

Biden declined to go into any detail on what type of policy riders might be in the final budget deal.

“The president and I are not really big on any riders at all, but this is a process which is normal for the House and Senate appropriations committees to get into the details. We’ve made it clear what we think are non-starters, both in numbers and riders. But I’m not going to negotiate out here,” he said.

The vice president emphasized that while lawmakers have now agreed on the total number of spending cuts, there is no final deal until they agree on what, precisely, those spending cuts are.

“There’s no deal until there’s a total deal, OK?” he said. “So if we do not get the makeup of that 73 the way we want it, we may not even be prepared to go that high. If they don’t get the makeup of it, they may argue that they’re going to go higher.

“Part of the negotiation in there doesn’t relate to dollar amounts," he added. "It relates to what they will swallow and [what] we will swallow relative to riders. There are certain things that we are just not going to do on riders. Even if you agree on everything else, we’re just not going to do it. They may have positions that are equally strongly as held, so that’s why it’s not a deal until it’s a whole deal.”

Biden was on Capitol Hill for more than an hour in a closed-door meeting with top Senate Democrats. Sens. Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray and Daniel Inouye all took part in the meeting. The $73 billion in spending cuts that Biden cited to reporters uses President Obama’s budget request for the current fiscal year, a budget request that was never enacted by Congress.