Congress’ crucial effort to strike a year-end fiscal deal is faltering before it’s really started.

Republicans are demanding changes to entitlement programs, a request that’s already been rejected by Democrats. Democrats want boosts in domestic spending without painful cuts, a nonstarter for the GOP. Meanwhile, there’s no House speaker scheduled to serve past October. And private staff-level talks are making little headway, according to sources close to the negotiations.

To top it all off, the Big Four congressional negotiators still haven’t been in the same room.

“It’s such a hard equation to figure right now,” said one Democratic aide close to the negotiations. A meeting at the White House “has gotta happen soon.”

Congressional Republicans are trying to project confidence, particularly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose “no shutdown, no debt default” vows are paramount to his party’s hopes of maintaining Senate control in 2016. But the Senate GOP has a major uphill battle: McConnell lacks a stable negotiating partner in the House and conservative forces in both chambers already are agitated about making sacrifices in any bipartisan compromise. But Democrats have flatly refused to entertain changes to Social Security or Medicare — a key demand for many congressional Republicans.

Read the article “While Federal Debt Continues Spiraling Upward, Budget Talks Stall Before They Even Begin” on politico.com.