Senate passes budget agreement

On Tuesday, the Senate passed a GOP-backed joint budget resolution, the first approved in five years.

Republicans say that the Senate Appropriations Committee will now start to draft spending bills cutting $496 billion in non-defense spending over the next 10 years, The Washington Post reports. The budget framework complies with domestic spending caps included in the 2011 Budget Control Act, commonly referred to as the sequester, and also uses almost $40 billion in off-budget funds to increase defense spending to more than $563 billion.

No Democrats voted for the resolution, and they said they would block cuts to medical research, housing programs for low-income workers, food stamps, and federal Pell Grants. "We're not going to sign on to a bill that goes to the sequester levels," Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said. "There is no reason for us to support these funding levels on the domestic side."

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