President Obama will once again fail to meet the statuary deadline for submitting a budget resolution, the White House announced in a letter to House Budget Committee chairman Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.).
Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, told Ryan that although the administration is “working diligently on our budget request,” the recent negotiations over the fiscal cliff caused the White House “to delay some of its FY 2014 budget preparations, which in turn will delay the budget’s submission to Congress.”
“We will submit it to Congress as soon as possible,” Zients wrote.
Some reports suggest that this year’s White House budget, officially due on February 4, may not be ready until March.
Obama, who only fulfilled this legal requirement (to submit a budget by the first Monday in February) once during his first term, has already missed that deadline more times than any president dating back to the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.
It is possible, and perhaps likely, that the White House budget will not be ready until after the U.S. Treasury Department has exhausted measures to avoid default on the nation’s $16 trillion debt. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner informed Congress on Monday that this would occur “between mid-February and early March of this year.”