Congressional leaders emerged from closed-door talks with Trump administration officials Wednesday claiming progress toward a budget deal but without any breakthroughs to announce — with less than three weeks to go before another government funding deadline.

At issue are fierce debates over federal spending levels as well as immigration and border security. The meeting, which lasted more than an hour in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, included Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), as well as White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney and White House legislative director Marc Short.


Following the confab, Republicans from the House, Senate and White House issued a joint statement that highlighted their support for higher defense spending and criticized any effort by Democrats to insist on including protections for young undocumented immigrants in a budget deal.

“It is important that we achieve a two-year agreement that funds our troops and provides for our national security and other critical functions of the Federal government,” they said. “It also remains important that members of Congress do not hold funding for our troops hostage for immigration policy.”

Democrats refrained from deriding their counterparts after the meeting.

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Upon exiting the talks, Pelosi told reporters that it is her "hope" the negotiations are making progress.

“We had a positive and productive meeting, and all parties have agreed to continue discussing a path forward to quickly resolve all of the issues ahead of us,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement. Democratic leadership aides said that in addition to spending and a deal to help Dreamers, leaders agreed to keep negotiating on a health care package and a disaster aid bill.

In a private call with House Democratic leaders after the meeting, Pelosi called the “Big Four” huddle a “process meeting,” according to a source on the call. She stressed that Democrats are eager for a deal to avert a government shutdown.

In his weekly leadership meeting, McConnell told other GOP senators that the gathering was “somewhat productive” while stressing that immigration policy was on a separate track from the spending negotiations, one source in the room said.

How to craft an immigration deal may be the most difficult task for the four leaders, particularly amid calls by President Donald Trump for construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border that Democrats and some Republicans steadfastly reject.

Trump has also called for other restrictive immigration policies in conjunction with a DACA deal, such as abolishing the diversity visa lottery, as well as limiting the ability for newly legalized immigrants to sponsor relatives for green cards.

Negotiators are discussing ways to address those concerns, senators said. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also said Wednesday that their plan would include a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers that strikes a middle ground between the Dream Act, which he authored with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and a more conservative proposal written by GOP Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma.

"The deal is there, we just need to go write it down and do it and get people to sign off on it," Graham said as he left Durbin's office following a meeting of Senate immigration negotiators.

Schumer was relatively optimistic during a meeting with his own leadership team late Wednesday afternoon.

“He felt there was some movement. He did feel there was some progress,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a member of Schumer’s leadership circle.

The parties are working to reach a budget deal to raise stiff spending caps on defense and non-defense programs and to keep the government funded past Jan. 19. A broader agreement is needed to avoid defense and domestic programs being slashed by $6 billion in this fiscal year alone.

A new budget deal is also crucial to avoiding a potential shutdown this month. Without knowing how much to spend this year, lawmakers cannot finish work on their trillion-dollar omnibus bill to fund the federal government.

Heading into Wednesday’s meeting, Schumer and Pelosi insisted that the budget deal make equal funding increases to the Pentagon and domestic programs.

Republican leaders have pushed back, however, on the Democrats’ call for parity in spending.

“There is no reason why funding for our national security and our service members should be limited by an arbitrary political formula that bears no relationship to actual need,” McConnell said earlier Wednesday in his first floor remarks of 2018.

The talks are even trickier with a pile-up of legislative items sitting in Congress — many of which Democrats say must be included in any spending deal. Some of those items, like renewing funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, have been mired in partisan bickering for months.

“We have two weeks to negotiate a budget deal that must also address a host of other items, including the CHIP, community health centers, disaster aid, and of course, the Dreamers.” Schumer said earlier on the floor Wednesday.

The budget negotiations are long overdue. Congress has been operating on autopilot since the fiscal year began Oct. 1. GOP leaders have blamed a packed legislative schedule, including their landmark tax overhaul bill, for forcing a delay in the spending work.

That lack of action has worried Capitol Hill veterans, particularly defense hawks who abhor stopgap spending bills.

“Leadership on both sides haven’t done their job in coming up with a common number,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told POLITICO on Tuesday, blasting the stop-and-go budget talks as an “incredible waste of time, effort and money.”

The federal spending caps stem from the 2011 Budget Control Act, which was passed after a fierce debt ceiling clash between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans.

Both sides of the aisle consider the spending restrictions impossible to live under. That’s prompted bipartisan deals to raise them: one in 2013 reached by then-Budget Chairman Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray and one in 2015 between Obama and then-Speaker John Boehner.

The latter deal — which inflamed conservatives in the House — was inked after Boehner had already announced his retirement.

Rachael Bade and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.