U.S. congressional budget leaders haggle during recess

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top Republican budget writers in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives were working over a two-week congressional recess to iron out differences between their budget plans passed last week, including ideas for changing Medicare.

Aides said House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price and his Senate counterpart, Mike Enzi, want Congress to approve a combined budget by April 15 - just three days after lawmakers return to Washington from their Easter and Passover break.

That timetable would leave almost no time for a normal negotiating panel with members of both parties to debate the budget, so the committee chairmen and their staffs were working to hammer out a pre-packaged deal ready for consideration.

"We are aiming to finish by the deadline," a senior House Republican aide said, referring to April 15, a statutory deadline which Congress has routinely ignored for years Republicans are keen to meet this time around.

Democrats, in the minority in both chambers since November's elections, will largely be left on the sidelines of the partisan Republican budget talks, party aides said.

One of the big differences Enzi and Price must reconcile is the future of the Medicare health program for the elderly. The House budget adopts Republican Representative Paul Ryan's controversial plan to turn Medicare into a system of subsidies for private health insurance.

The Senate's budget keeps Medicare's fee-for-service structure but adopts the same $430 billion savings goal proposed by President Barack Obama. Some moderate Republican senators facing re-election in 2016 may have difficulty voting for the more aggressive House plan.

The Senate budget cuts $5.1 trillion from domestic spending over 10 years, slightly less than the $5.5 trillion sought by the House. These figures will need to be brought into agreement.

The budgets are expected to keep "sequester" spending caps that are nominally embedded in both budgets, a Republican Senate aide said, despite demands from defense hawks in the party to increase the core military budget.

Instead, both budgets added about $38 billion in off-budget war funding, a plan that was only narrowly accepted in the House as defense hawks prevailed over fiscal conservatives.

Enzi has said that easing the sequester caps cannot be handled through the non-binding budgets, only by altering the 2011 Budget Control Act, which put the caps in place.

(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Cynthia Osterman)