WASHINGTON — Republicans controlling Congress Wednesday unveiled a budget plan for the upcoming year and beyond, setting up a confrontation with President Obama over his signature health care law and his vow to boost spending on domestic programs like transportation and education.

House-Senate negotiators on the sweeping – but nonbinding – budget plan sealed agreement Wednesday. The 10-year balanced budget plan calls upon lawmakers to repeal Obama’s health care law while enacting major curbs on safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps. It would cut future-year budgets for domestic agencies below already tight spending “caps” that the White House vows to dismantle.

Separately, the House took up a normally bipartisan bill funding veterans’ programs, but the measure ran into unusual opposition from Democrats despite increases of almost 6 percent above current levels for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The White House promises to veto the veterans’ bill in protest of unrelated GOP plans to boost the Pentagon’s budget while ignoring pleas to increase domestic programs.

The broader 10-year budget plan promised to cut federal spending projected at almost $50 trillion over the coming decade by more than $5 trillion, with the bulk of the cuts coming from federal health care programs.

“We are going to be passing a balanced budget for a stronger America so that we can … look to the future of our country and say to our children and my grandchildren that we’re doing everything that we can do to get this budget into balance,” said Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn.

But Republicans are focused more on repealing so-called “Obamacare” than they are cutting spending elsewhere in the budget and following through on their promise to balance the budget within a decade.

That’s because the annual congressional budget measure by itself does nothing unless followed up by binding legislation to cut spending and set agency operating budgets. The budget measure also allows majority Republicans advance a special fast-track budget bill to Obama without the threat of a Democratic filibuster.


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