President Obama may have reached his last budget deal with Congress

After years of tense standoffs, congressional leaders and President Barack Obama have seemingly settled their last budget fight.

Ahead of his departure, outgoing House Speaker John Boehner tied up loose ends by solidifying a tentative agreement to increase federal spending by $80 billion over two years, and to raise the debt ceiling through 2017.

How does the budget deal breakdown? About $50 billion of the agreement has been allocated for defense and nondefense spending for fiscal year 2016. Each of those spending categories will get a $15 billion bump in fiscal year 2017, rounding out the $80 billion deal, which is poised to pass Congress this week.

“Eighty billion dollars in Washington budget land isn’t a great deal of money, but the political ramifications are potentially huge,” says Takeaway Washington Correspondent Todd Zwillich. “Importantly, you’ve got an increase in the debt limit through March 2017. That means that confrontations over credit-ruining defaults are off the table until well into the term of the next president.”

On Friday, Speaker Boehner plans to turn over his gavel to Rep. Paul Ryan—the Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is expected to be formally elected to succeed Boehner on Thursday. In essence, this plan to avert another government shutdown is “viewed as a gift that John Boehner has handed to Paul Ryan as an incoming speaker in a fractious House,” Zwillich says.

“I made it clear a month ago when I announced that I was leaving that I wanted to do my best to clean the barn,” Speaker Boehner told reporters on Tuesday. “I didn't want anyone to walk into a dirty barn full of you-know-what. So I've done my best to try and clean it up.”

However, some conservative members of the Republican Party are not happy with the deal.

“I identify more with what one of my friends said: 'I didn't know when Boehner cleaned out the barn I'd get so much manure on me,’” says Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas.

Though it’s been billed as a present, Congressman Ryan is also being cagey about the deal.

“I think the process stinks,” Rep. Ryan said of the secretive talks that produced the deal.

But Zwillich says that’s just a strategy to appeal to conservatives.

“A lot of people are sort of confused by [Ryan’s] statement because the process that lead to this agreement was almost identical to the one that Paul Ryan himself used in 2011 that led to what’s called the Ryan-Murray budget deal,” says Zwillich. “That’s where we got sequestration in the first place, which is really what this whole deal and the spending confrontation is all about … He’s getting on the right side of conservatives who are already very skeptical of this deal.”

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.