By Frances Symes, CQ Staff

Two bipartisan groups of lawmakers are working behind the scenes to revive momentum for comprehensive legislation to address the government’s fiscal woes and in particular to chart a course for long-term deficit reduction.

After the mostly abortive budget debates of the past year, which concluded with the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction not reaching agreement, the subject moved to the background. But interest is again picking up.

Republicans fiercely criticized the president’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal, released Feb. 13, for doing little to contain the rising federal debt. And Democrats continue to object that Republicans are too eager to reduce spending and too unwilling to raise taxes on the wealthy.

Yet, despite all the politicking, in recent weeks lawmakers in both chambers have been working to put bipartisan, comprehensive deficit reduction plans into legislative form — a process that did not really happen last year.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is among the party leaders who have expressed doubts about these bipartisan efforts and said lawmakers need to come up with specific legislation that can be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. “Bring it to me, and I’ll take a look at it,” the Democratic leader said last November. “But other than that, it’s just happy talk.”

Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said he and a group of House Republicans and Democrats are aiming to do what Reid asked. “One of the problems with both Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin and the ‘Gang of Six’ when they rolled out their proposals is that they were all concepts. That’s different than trying to put things into legislative language,” Simpson said, referring to deficit reduction proposals from two bipartisan commissions and a group of senators.

Simpson conceded that making proposals as specific as possible is a necessary step in selling an idea. “When you go talk to somebody about it, you continue to hear, ‘Well, let me see what I’m looking at; what are you talking about?’ ” he said.

House Group Pushing Ahead

Simpson and Heath Shuler, D-N.C., gathered the signatures of more than 100 House lawmakers from both parties on a letter last fall urging the joint deficit reduction panel to “go big” and to propose a $4 trillion package of budget savings. “To succeed,” the group wrote, “all options for mandatory and discretionary spending must be on the table.”

Those two lawmakers are now leading a working group of six to 10 House members that is drafting deficit reduction legislation. Specifics about their plan have not been released, but it is expected to follow the contours of previous efforts by calling for a combination of mandatory and discretionary spending cuts, coupled with a revenue-raising overhaul of the tax code.

Although the leaders of the effort in the House are regarded as moderates, the larger coalition of lawmakers who backed the “go big” approach came from across the political spectrum, including those who would not usually count themselves as fiscal conservatives.

The real question, said Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., the chairman of the Blue Dog Coalition’s Task Force on Fiscal Responsibility who has been involved in the recent talks, is how many of those lawmakers will get behind the legislation once it is drafted.

Meanwhile, the Senate’s Gang of Six has quietly resumed meeting over the past few months after its deficit reduction recommendations did not catch fire over the past year. The gang had proposed a $3.7 trillion plan that relied on a combination of spending cuts, a tax overhaul and changes in entitlement programs to cut the deficit.