WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Thursday will lay out a plan to end sequestration that Republicans immediately will reject, but GOP members "don't have a plan" of their own.

Obama will travel to Philadelphia to meet with House Democrats at a caucus retreat, and is expected to provide details of his 2016 federal budget plan. In it, the White House says he will for the second consecutive year propose ending sequestration. the across-the-board domestic and defense budget cuts.

Obama will release that budget plan on Monday, including a $534 billion base Pentagon spending plan and a $51 billion overseas contingency operations (OCO) request.

The White House says the federal spending plan "will reverse harmful sequestration cuts and instead show how we can invest in his vision for middle class economics by making paychecks go further, creating good jobs here in the United States, and preparing hardworking Americans to earn higher wages."

The Obama budget will seek to "fully reverse those cuts for domestic priorities, and match those investments dollar-for-dollar with the resources our troops need to keep America safe," the White House said.

Obama and congressional Democrats want to raise domestic spending caps to fund entitlement programs they covet. The White House and some Democrats are willing to raise defense spending caps to secure support from hawkish Republicans.

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But House and Senate GOP leaders — and their hand-picked chairmen of the budget committees — have no interest in raising the spending caps.

House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., declared on Tuesday that Washington has "a spending problem."

"And for all that's been said about the recent decrease in annual deficits, which we welcome, we have not solved our nation's fiscal challenges," Price said, warning about the nation's debt and deficit levels. "In fact, under the status quo, our fiscal and economic concerns are only [getting] worse."

Price by this spring must produce a 2016 budget resolution with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo. On Wednesday, Enzi said of his work with Price: "We will act to control the spending, reduce the deficits, and end the debt."

"Runaway spending habits have bred excessive deficits and incredible debt," Enzi said. "That just doesn't seem right to me."

Neither Republican budget chairman mentioned increasing defense spending during his opening statement of each panel's first hearing of the new congressional session.

Obama's budget plan likely will be dead on arrival DOA the moment it's released, congressional observers agree.

That means any plan to provide more temporary and partial relief from sequestration similar to the Ryan-Murray deal of late 2012 will have to be conceived on Capitol Hill.

"We're the ones who created this mess," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Wednesday. "We don't have a plan."

Graham said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "is challenging some of us on the committee to find a plan."

With Obama's budget going nowhere, the coming GOP budget resolution will is likely to keep in place existing spending caps, and the Armed Services committee will still looking for a passable plan, mean the next round of sequestration will occur in October.

Graham pleaded with Obama to "help us," because "we can't do this by ourselves."

"We're going to need the commander in chief to weigh in and inform the American people that the sequestration cuts are unacceptable," Graham said. "Not just on the defense side."

Obama will begin doing just that on Thursday — but little has changed since he first took office in January 2009.

Republicans won't like what the commander in chief will have to say, and sources say the president likely would veto any GOP budget resolution that hits his desk this spring.

USA Today contributed to this report.

Email: jbennett@defensenews.com

Twitter: @bennettjohnt

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