Will they or won't they is once again the big Washington question. Only this time the query isn't about who will run for president. Instead, it's about whether Congress will reach agreement on a federal budget.

House Republicans led by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., are moving to pass a budget that would reduce the deficit by eliminating money for healthcare reform and immediately slashing spending at federal agencies, including $82 million from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Both cuts are anathema to Democrats.

Amid the political posturing, there are signs that cooler heads might prevail. Republicans remember the political repercussions of Newt Gingrich's shutdown in 1995. Many worry they could be politically hurt by Americans' anger, and that fear may yet trump GOP concerns about the deficit, especially if Democrats are willing to meet somewhere in the middle on spending cuts, say political experts.

Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics for Moody's Analytics Inc., also predicts an agreement.

"There are too many people in Congress who remember what happened last time they played this game," he says. "There will be small cuts in discretionary spending, and we will muddle through the next couple of years -- until the next election."

Furthermore, the SEC may be in especially good shape. SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro has warned that the Republicans' proposed cuts would cripple her agency's ability to carry out the unprecedented rule-writing obligations and new supervisory duties the Dodd-Frank Act imposes.

While Republicans want to rein in Dodd-Frank's implementation, in the end the SEC is funded by user fees, and funding can be restored without affecting the federal deficit. Given that the House GOP's priority is reducing the deficit, there's a good chance they'll relent on cutting the agency's funds.

"I can't imagine that they would let it fall apart," says Nossaman LLP lobbyist Paul Quinn. "There will be some brinkmanship," but he says the agencies would get most of their resources, though potentially through a separate appropriation rather than in the budget deal.

That's not to say there still isn't plenty of worry an agreement won't happen.

"It does look an awful lot like a game of chicken," says Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, a group that has joined with ShareOwners.org and the Council of Institutional Investors in a campaign to restore funding to the SEC and CFTC. "It's difficult to predict what the endgame will look like," she said in a Feb. 16 call with reporters.

The mess is all the harder to solve because there are actually three separate impasses over federal spending.

First, Republicans and Democrats can't agree on funding the government for the rest of fiscal 2011, for which temporary funding runs out March 4. They also disagree on raising the government's current debt ceiling. Finally, they are in wide disagreement on the 2012 budget President Obama just proposed.

That means three deals must be brokered to avoid a government shutdown.

There is plenty of concern about financial agencies' ability to function and implement the Dodd-Frank Act without more money. That's especially true for the CFTC, which gets the biggest increase in duties under Dodd-Frank -- the task of regulating major parts of the derivatives market. Unlike the SEC, the CFTC operates on federal budget funds.

"The CFTC has been strapped to put in place the Dodd-Frank requirements," says Nathan Endrud, an attorney at Leonard, Street and Deinard PA in Minneapolis who focuses on energy industry regulatory issues including those at the CFTC. He says that the delay has already created uncertainties. "Everybody is sitting in a little bit of limbo," he says.

Roper says, "Cuts of that magnitude would severely erode the ability of these two agencies to rein in the kind of Wall Street excesses that helped to land us in our current fiscal difficulties."

Some political experts say there is a possibility that the White House could step in to try to craft a compromise, but they warn the battle may get worse before it is resolved.

"I suspect we will have some bumps along the road, including a government shutdown and delay in raising the debt ceiling," says Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He says the parties are painting themselves into corners. "Obama won't agree to anything close to what the House Republicans are proposing for the current fiscal year, and their leaders may feel pressured by their conservative base to hold out for more cuts than he will accept."

One of those bumps may be quickly approaching. House Speaker John Boehner on Feb. 17 told reporters the GOP will reject any short-term funding extension beyond March 4 unless it includes a spending cut. "When we say we're going to cut spending, read my lips: We're going to cut spending," he said.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, says a shutdown is unlikely because both sides say they don't want it. "But once egos get involved on Capitol Hill and in the White House, you never know for sure," he says.

Recalling the blame heaped on Republicans for the 1995 shutdown, he says Obama might have the edge in a new confrontation. "Yet who knows?" he says. "The details will matter. Who is viewed as stubborn? Who has the better arguments overall? How much do the Tea Party members define what the public thinks is the GOP position? And so on. Too soon to say."