Congress has about three months standing until a government shutdown deadline.

While some lawmakers already expect both chambers will decide to punt the threat to buy time for negotiations, both sides are far apart as they dig in their heels for another high-stakes spending battle.

“It will be very difficult,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who is also an appropriator, told The Hill. “We’ve got to agree to our agreements and stick with it.”

The White House and House GOP leadership agreed to spending caps for fiscal 2024 as part of a larger deal to raise the debt limit before an early June deadline to prevent a national default.

But in the weeks since the bill’s passage, Democrats and Republicans have offered very different perspectives as to how those caps should be applied to spending talks. 

Tensions simmered at House spending hearing last week after Democrats strongly opposed a GOP-backed plan to draft fiscal year 2024 funding bills at levels much lower than the limits agreed upon by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). 

“What kind of deal is that? What kind of respect for yourselves is that?” said Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, at the time.

The Republican plan comes after a group of conservatives led a revolt that paralyzed the House floor earlier this month — partly in protest of the debt limit deal brokered by McCarthy, which hardliners panned as not going far enough to curb spending.

The Hill’s Aris Folley has more here.