Agreement reached in Congress for short-term spending bill

House Speaker Paul Ryan told Republican lawmakers late Tuesday that congressional leaders have finally reached a deal on a $1.1 trillion, year-end tax and spending package.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., center, accompanied by, from left, Sen. And it increases the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars by extending numerous, popular tax credits without paying for them.

Congressional leaders have reached a deal that will let them go home for the holidays and avoid spending most of 2016 squabbling about government shutdowns.

Instead, the bill included the bipartisan reform of the Visa Waiver Program, adopted on December 8.

After the closed-door meeting, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., suggested uniting behind Ryan as the new speaker and supporting the legislation. Republican lawmakers added that Ryan will put the tax and spending bills to a vote on Thursday, just before they leave town for the rest of the year. “We won some; we lost some”.

“Democrats won some; they lost some”, he said. “At the end of the day we’re going to get this done”.

The result of the secretive negotiations is compromise, with both Republican leadership and Democrats claiming wins.

“We may not be in the majority, but we’re feeling that these goals are on track”, said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Democrats indicated they weren’t immediately happy with the bill’s proposed lifting of the decades-old oil export ban, suggesting there may be troubles getting the measure passed. A tax on health insurance may also get suspended.

A major priority for the GOP and some Democrats was lifting the 40-year-old bar against exporting US crude oil, a remnant of the 1970s oil shortages that industry supporters consider unneeded with today’s explosion of domestic oil extraction.

“The agreement will be final when we see the language reflects the negotiations”, Kristen Orthman said.

“It’s the most important policy in the country for renewable energy”, Bryan Miller, vice president for policy at the San Francisco-based rooftop solar developer Sunrun Inc., said. “If you take away either, the foundation crumbles”. Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said the tax package also would include a one-year delay in a tax on health insurance providers.

The bills negotiated will include tax breaks for wind and solar development and will repeal a ban on oil exports. Ryan has already said that he will rely on Democrats to help push the package through so, barring some unforeseen opposition, the bill is likely to sail through both houses of Congress. Eleventh-hour differences remained over Republican efforts to lift a ban on US oil exports. It does reportedly include some new restrictions on visitors from 38 friendly nations whose citizens have been able to come to the US without visas, blocking any who have traveled to Syria, Sudan, Iraq, or Iran in the past five years.

He told colleagues that the spending bill will postpone the “Cadillac tax” on expensive healthcare plans and the tax package will place a two-year moratorium on the medical device tax, two critical sources of revenue for ObamaCare. The price tag was expected to be several hundred billion dollars or more over a decade, which would further add to federal deficits. Only a few of those breaks are new. College students could keep their $2,500 tax credit for school expenses.

The bill includes Republican and corporate priorities such as making the research-and-development tax credit permanent for the first time since it was created in 1981 and expanding it so that some small companies that aren’t making profits can take the credit against payroll taxes.

The 200-page tax package covers $560 billion in breaks that will no longer expire, and $650 billion in total tax relief over 10 years.

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly, Donna Cassata.