The White House's entrance into congressional talks over spending cuts -- and the GOP's pursuit of multiple policy riders restricting U.S. EPA -- today overshadowed the easy Senate passage of a two-week stopgap funding bill.

After the Senate voted, 91-9, to clear a House-crafted two-week continuing resolution (CR) that slices $4 billion in federal spending, including more than $500 million from the Army Corps of Engineers and the Energy Department, President Obama announced he would tap Vice President Joe Biden to steer negotiations with leaders of both parties on a broader government funding deal.

"Republicans should immediately come to the table and start negotiating with us on a long-term solution," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters today. Reaching an agreement before the two-week CR expires March 18 "can be done," Reid added, "but it will take cooperation."

For energy and environmental policymakers, that spending dynamic is proceeding on two tracks: agency spending and policy riders. House Republicans added more than a dozen provisions handcuffing Obama administration regulations to the seven-month CR they passed on Feb. 19, curbing movement on everything from greenhouse gas emissions to ethanol-blend fuels. But such measures are clear nonstarters with Reid as well as the White House.

In his statement on the proposed Biden-led bipartisan talks, Obama subtly ruled out the House riders by calling for the next spending measure to be "free of any party's social or political agenda."

But an influential bloc of conservatives is likely to insist on keeping agency policymaking limits on the table for as long as possible. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) acknowledged a "diversity of opinion" among members of the tea party caucus she founded over whether to make spending cuts or riders the GOP's top priority.

Of "the work that was done on" the House's seven-month CR, Bachmann said, "people want to make sure that's reflected on the next CR."

Today's lopsided Senate vote count in favor of the stopgap funding bill found a motley crew of lawmakers voting "no," including liberals Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and conservatives Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and James Risch (R-Idaho).

House Democrats, after using yesterday's debate on the two-week CR to force a vote on eliminating tax breaks for major oil companies, joined their Senate counterparts in leaning on GOP leaders to come to the table for the Biden-led discussions. In addition, Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and John Sarbanes (D-Md.) joined conservation groups for a rally to decry the House CR's impact on environmental regulations.

'A majority' of riders gone?

Meanwhile, one senior House Republican appropriator predicted today that his colleagues would be willing to drop most of the amendments that would block specific environmental programs if the spending levels in a longer-term bill met their goals.

"The big issue is the dollar amount," House Interior and Environment Appropriations Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told E&ENews PM. "And in fact, if you can work out the dollar amount, the rest of the language can probably go away. Not all of it, but a majority of it."

Democrats have slammed many of the riders that were aimed at the Obama administration's priorities and cheered their removal from the two-week CR -- third-ranking Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York called it a "good sign" today -- but they have been more willing to compromise on overall spending.

"If the spending can be worked out, we can work out the other things," Simpson said. "There were a lot of amendments that were attached that I don't think anybody really expects to stay in through a complete CR. I can't specifically say which ones, but there are some that probably won't be acceptable."

The offer to remove riders in exchange for spending cuts could have been a more sustainable position in negotiations "if the numbers were reasonable," said Moran, the ranking Democrat on Simpson's appropriations subpanel.

"But [Republicans] are eliminating so many programs" through funding starvation, Moran said, that "it's not just the riders, it's the numbers. We're talking about much more than the riders being poison pills."

Simpson told E&E yesterday that relying on more two-week CRs to secure agreement on further incremental funding cuts would effectively remove the EPA and other riders from consideration (E&E Daily, March 2). Moran acknowledged that some Republicans are ready to take up more short-term bills in the interest of trimming federal spending but warned that "you can't keep nickel-and-diming the budget with $2 billion [in cuts] a week."

Asked for the handful of riders that would remain particularly important to Republican leaders during long-term spending talks, Simpson cited an effort to block the Interior Department's new "wild lands" policy, language blocking U.S. EPA's greenhouse gas rules and an effort to stop EPA from regulating new kinds of "navigable waters" under the Clean Water Act.

Simpson said he understood the decision to pull divisive amendments such as the greenhouse gas measures from the two-week spending bill that was passed by the House yesterday.

"I understand why they didn't want to put any veto bait in the two-week extension," he said. "Plus, that's just a two-week extension, so it didn't really matter."

No one on the Republican side pushed to include that language in the two-week bill, Simpson said, adding that next year's spending bill looks like the "most likely place" for a measure to pull funding for EPA's climate program.

"It's more important that we get the funding done so we don't have a government shutdown, and this is all stuff that can be put in the [2012] appropriation bill," he said.