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A single senator on Tuesday stopped the advance of a House-Senate agreement that would ostensibly deliver the first balanced budget of this century, but the deal’s fate faced far greater obstacles than just his objections. Even before its official unveiling, the agreement is already threatened with irrelevance amid a bipartisan clamor for more spending in a new era of loosening belts. ... A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing measures to speed the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process for drugs and medical devices, which would probably require additional spending. ... From the outside, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a co-author of the balanced budget agreement of 1997, called for doubling the National Institutes of Health’s budget. All of those efforts would conflict with the strict domestic spending caps established by the Budget Control Act of 2011 — which the Republican budget accord did nothing to change. (Weisman, 4/28)

Sen. Bob Corker has slammed the brakes on a much-awaited budget deal that was supposed to sail to passage this week — taking on Republican leadership, budget negotiators and appropriators alike over what he calls a spending “gimmick” that produces billions in fantasy savings. The Tennessee Republican on Tuesday said he would not sign the final budget deal because the agreement would let appropriators take unspent money from mandatory programs — like a crime victims fund or children’s insurance account — and use it to pay for other congressional priorities. Because the money was never going to be spent anyway, lawmakers like Corker think it’s dubious to count it as “savings.” (Bade, 4/29)

Political pragmatism appears to have once again trumped ideological fervor as the Republicans put the finishing touches on their budget plan for fiscal 2016. The new budget blueprint originally was conceived as a first major step towards wiping out the deficit within the coming decade through a series of draconian spending cuts and changes in Medicare, Medicaid and other costly entitlement programs. But for now, at least, Congress is on track to approving substantially more spending in the coming year. (Pianin, 4/28)