As Congressional leaders go to the White House for a fifth straight day, there are few details available on what exactly is on the negotiating table when it comes to a debt limit increase and possible budget cuts.
Sure, we have the general outlines of what is being talked about - maybe as much as $4 trillion in budget savings over ten years and reforms that save money in entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
In yesterday's meeting at the White House, supposedly there was a lot of talk about $1.5 trillion in budget savings over ten years.
But ballpark figures like that aren't the same as knowing that a certain programs are going to go down the tubes or that one program will be cut while another will be spared the budget knife.
That type of fine print is what gets the blood moving on Capitol Hill in both parties.
For example, as the House works on spending bills for next year's federal budget, a bipartisan revolt was brewing on Wednesday against plans to do away with the COPS program, which funnels money to local governments to help them hire police officers.
"Now is not the time to turn our backs on local law enforcement officers," said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), who was joined by Democrats and Republican Dave Reichert of Washington State, a former police officer who has tangled with his own party on this issue for years.
How much money is at stake? $240 million this year in money that goes back to state and local governments to hire police officers.
As we saw earlier this year when Republicans tried to make more cuts in the 2011 budget, once you get to the details, sometimes the calls for cuts fade away in the Congress, as members of both parties scramble to save funding for certain items.
As for the White House, officials continue to refuse to publicly lay out their planned cuts, or what they might accept in terms of budget savings in a deal with the GOP.
"That's not how negotiations should work," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who again sparred with reporters at a briefing Wednesday on why the Obama Administration likes to detail what Republican plans would do, but doesn't want to shed light on what President Obama would cut.
"We believe that in order to achieve balance, you need to sit around a table and work out a balanced package," Carney added, with "balanced" being the codeword for a deal that includes tax revenue increases.
The White House again said that there must be a deal before the August 2 deadline, though for many Republicans, that continues to be an artificial deadline at best.
"The Aug 2 deadline is another Treasury invented crisis," said Rep. Dennis Ross on Twitter, a Tea Party freshman from Florida.
And it's now 19 days away, real or not.
As for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he will meet today behind closed doors with Senate Democrats - we'll see if any details leak out from that meeting.
