Not everyone will cheer a US budget deal Negotiators in the US Congress are thrashing out the final details of a bipartisan budget deal that is expected to be unveiled this week, although Capitol Hill aides warned that talks could still fall apart at the eleventh hour. An agreement would be very narrow - far from a sweeping "grand bargain" on deficit reduction or tax reform - but has some obvious benefits. It would settle the path of spending for government agencies for the next two years, removing some uncertainty over the path of US fiscal policy and preventing a new federal shutdown. Through 2015, it would replace about $65bn of the automatic spending cuts - known as sequestration - that are disliked by many US legislators for their arbitrary nature. And it could herald a new era of detente, if not co-operation, on fiscal policy, between Republicans and Democrats, who have been at each other's throats on the budget for nearly three years. But the agreement will also leave some losers in sectors that will be hit by policies designed to replace the sequestration cuts. These targeted groups are bound to lobby aggressively to save their skin in any deal, and if they fail, try to stop the agreement from passing Congress. Airlines Rather than raise taxes, Republicans have said they would be open to some new revenue from higher user fees. As a result, one of the main proposals on the table is a doubling of the airline security fee that is charged on each airline ticket from $2.50 to $5. America's carriers - as well as some consumer and travel groups - are already up in arms, and bracing themselves for a hit. "We're very concerned and we're actively fighting this, this is a major issue for airline customers who are already overly taxed," says Jean Medina, senior vice-president for communications at Airlines for America, a lobby group. They argue that the Transportation Security Administration is already adequately funded, and have even launched a campaign, Stop the Air Tax Now. Defence companies Since about half of the cuts under sequestration are imposed on the Pentagon, defence companies and their suppliers are generally considered among the hardest hit by the automatic reductions. So some relief from those cuts will certainly be well received by the largest US defence contractors. However, they are not crowing about the agreement that is on the table, since it is far from the full replacement of sequestration over the coming years that they have been pushing for. This will become even less likely after a deal to lock in spending levels is reached. "The budget deal would only slightly slow the acceleration of the damage that is being done to the defence industrial base in fiscal year 2014 and 2015," says Dan Stohr of the Aerospace Industries Association, the biggest defence lobby group. The only way to stop acceleration of the damage is to repeal the sequester. Healthcare providers Healthcare providers such as hospitals and doctors have mostly been consumed by the impact of the troubled rollout of "Obamacare," the 2010 healthcare reform, but they are still keeping close tabs on the budget talks. Under sequestration, they were hit by a 2 per cent cut to payments through Medicare, the giant health scheme for the elderly. But this is unlikely to be reversed or even curbed in any budget deal, causing a lot of anxiety among healthcare industry lobbyists. Our strong hope is that they are going to come together and deal with all sequestration and not leave any of it off the table. It would be irresponsible to fix it for some and not for others," says Jeff Cohen, executive vice-president for advocacy and political affairs at the Federation of American Hospitals, citing "real stress" and "job losses" happening at many facilities. Moreover, there could potentially be another threat to hospitals if negotiators decide to trim federal payments to hospitals treating uninsured Americans, another option that is being discussed. "It's in the mix and we are 100 per cent opposed to it," Mr Cohen says. Federal employee unions US government workers have been operating under a pay freeze for three years - and experienced some financial pain and a lot of disruption as a result of the sequestration cuts and the government shutdown. But on the table now is a plan to raise pension contributions from federal workers, which is acceptable to some Democrats because it does not hit broader Social Security pension or Medicare health benefits. Federal employees are anguished. "That is totally unacceptable," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, in a letter to the negotiators last week. Some powerful Democratic legislators from Maryland, which include big shares of federal workers, have been trying hard to limit any cuts to government pensions in the deal, but it is unclear whether they will be successful. Unemployed Americans and discount retailers Congressional Democrats and the White House have been pushing hard to include an extension of jobless benefits in the budget talks, or at least alongside them, but are meeting resistance from Republicans. Federal assistance for the long-term unemployed runs out at the end of this month, affecting 1.3m beneficiaries and potentially creating a fiscal drag of as much as 0.4 percentage points from first-quarter gross domestic product. If there is no deal on jobless benefits, it could hit discount retailers who most benefit from spending by the unemployed, which in some cases sustains many local economies in impoverished parts of the US.