U.S. Senate passes budget deal, focus shifts to spending

By David Lawder and Richard Cowan WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate passed a two-year budget deal on Wednesday to ease automatic spending cuts and reduce the risk of a government shutdown, but fights were already breaking out over how to implement the budget pact. By a vote of 64-36, the Senate sent the measure to President Barack Obama to be signed into law, an achievement for a divided Congress that has failed to agree on a budget since 2009. The deal, passed in the House of Representatives last week by an overwhelming margin, restores overall fiscal 2014 spending levels for government agencies to $1.012 trillion, trimming the across-the-board budget cuts that were set to begin next month by about $63 billion over two years. Now, there will be a mad dash by the House and Senate Appropriations committees to cobble together a massive spending bill that implements the deal and carves up the funding pie among thousands of government programs from national parks to the military.