As Vice-President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush continue to tout their plans to spend a $2 trillion surplus over 10 years, Congress has voted to spend half of it in next year's budget.
Mr Bush remains slightly ahead in most of the opinion polls but within the margin of error so it is regarded as a technical dead heat.
Both candidates have drawn up elaborate plans to win the election based on how to spend the excess tax revenues generated by the booming economy which are estimated to total $2 trillion over the next decade.
Mr Bush would use up much of it in generous tax cuts while Mr Gore would combine a more modest tax cut with big spending on Medicare, education and defence.
But Congress in its dying days before the election has not been able to resist flouting its own spending curbs and dipping into the inviting surplus.
The 2001 budget passed by the House of Representatives could use up about $1 trillion or half the amount that Mr Gore and Mr Bush want to spend in their plans.
President Clinton has indicated he may veto the budget on which the Senate was expected to vote yesterday.
The President told the Republican-controlled Congress: "You chose to put forward a partisan legislative package that ignores our key concerns."
A veto would plunge Congress into disarray just a week before the elections for President and for both houses.
Mr Bush and Mr Gore will try to turn the impasse to their advantage by blaming their congressional opponents.
Meanwhile, Mr Gore and the Green Party candidate, Mr Ralph Nader, continue to spar over how the latter can damage the Vice-President's prospects in his neck-and-neck contest with Mr Bush. Mr Nader said that it was "cowardly" for Gore supporters to maintain that by taking votes from the Vice-President he would set back the country's social agenda.
Mr Nader said he was "not at all" interested in talking to Mr Gore as some Gore supporters have urged.
Mr Gore, when asked on the CBS Early Show if Mr Nader's support could lose him the election, said carefully: "I think that in the closing days of the election, it's likely that most voters will want to participate in the choice between myself and Governor Bush."
Mr Bush has hardened the tone of his campaign against Mr Gore by making pointed references to his association with Mr Clinton. He told a meeting in Pennsylvania that the Clinton-Gore administration lived by the credo "If it feels good, do it".
Mr Bush said: "Americans will realise my opponent's campaign is a fitting close to the Clinton-Gore years. They are going out as they came in, their guide the nightly polls, their goal the morning headlines, their legacy the fruitless search for a legacy."
Mr Bush insisted that he would introduce a less harsh and partisan tone to politics in Washington than would happen under Mr Gore.
"My opponent has set a tone that shows what he is going to be should he win. He talked of `ripping the lungs out' of political opponents.
"Part of his campaign headquarters is called, unbelievably enough, `the slaughterhouse' and his staff proudly calls itself `the killers'," Mr Bush said, referring to an interview with the Gore staff where they jokingly used these terms.
Meanwhile a new survey shows that almost a quarter of the electorate is swinging back and forth between the candidates for the election on November 7th.
This is a higher figure than is normal at such a late stage in a presidential election.
These "swing voters" are changing their minds from week to week and confusing pollsters. They are distinct from the 5 per cent of the electorate who are classed as "undecided".
The survey carried out for Associated Press by the Pew Research Centre shows that the swing voters tend to be more Democratic and more supportive of Mr Gore whom most of them believe to be the most qualified. His challenge is to persuade those leaning to him to come out and vote.