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WASHINGTON (AP) — A dispute over budget cuts that threaten dozens of smaller control towers with closure slowed Senate progress Tuesday on legislation to avoid a government shutdown on March 27.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., refused repeatedly to permit final passage of the measure unless Democrats first allow a vote on his plan for erasing most of the cuts aimed at towers operated by Federal Aviation Administration contract employees.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., just as persistently declined to give in, and other Democrats noted that House Republicans had rejected calls to give all federal agencies the type of budget flexibility that Moran was seeking.

The test of wills endured as Republicans and Democrats in Congress struggled with two goals — ensuring there is no interruption of routine government funding while simultaneously vying for political advantage in the wake of $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts that kicked in earlier this month.

Across the Capitol, the Republican-controlled House began debate on a budget that promises to eliminate federal deficits in decade. The blueprint, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, D-Wis., calls for $6.4 trillion in spending cuts and no tax increases, and is expected to clear by week's end.

For their part, Senate Republicans kept their distance from the plan, deciding not to seek a symbolic vote on it when the Senate begins its own budget debate later in the week.

Sensing an opportunity for political mischief, Senate Democrats vowed not to let Republicans off easy. They said they would require a vote on Ryan's budget — even though they unanimously oppose it.

As gridlock gripped the Senate, the top U.S. commander in South America told Congress the cuts would reduce if not eliminate the entire fleet of ships used to counter drug-runners.

Gen. John Kelly said that U.S. forces seized 150 to 200 tons of cocaine last year. If the budget cuts stand, "next year all of that will make its way ashore and into the United States," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In the Senate, Moran said, "It's not my nature to be an obstructionist" as he pressed his case. He added that his proposal has support from senators in both parties and that House Republican leaders have indicated the bill's final approval would not be jeopardized if the change were incorporated.

Democrats responded tartly.

"I want to restore the Head Start to 70,000 children. I want to restore 10,000 teacher jobs," countered Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., referring to the threatened impact of across-the-board cuts elsewhere in the budget.

In general, senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee have worked harmoniously to ease the impact of the $85 billion in spending cuts on numerous agencies.

As drafted, the measure includes House-passed provisions to give the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs flexibility in coping with the cuts. It also extends similar leeway to the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the Food and Drug Administration.

There was no such provision for the FAA, where Moran said officials had ordered a 75 percent cut in funding for airport towers operated by contract employees even though the agency's overall reduction is 5 percent.

The Kansan suggested strongly that Democrats were playing politics with the issue.

"I've been trying to fathom why would the Department of Transportation, in a sense, single out this program," he said on Monday night.

"It's hard for me to fathom a good answer to that question, and the closest I can come is there are those in Washington, D.C., who want to demonstrate that we can't cut a dime — we can't cut $85 billion in federal spending from $3.6 trillion, just 28 days of spending — at all," added Moran, who doubles as chairman of the Senate Republican campaign committee.

In the case of the FAA, Moran's office circulated a list of 173 facilities that could be closed. Seven were in the senator's home state and the rest scattered around the country. Most if not all are smaller or medium-size locations.

Moran's proposal calls for transferring $50 million to the contract tower program from FAA accounts that have unspent funds. His office said the shift would leave the contract tower program with the same 5 percent cut that other parts of the agency must absorb.

FAA Administrator Michael P. Huerta told Congress recently that when it came to deciding where to cut, the agency tried to "minimize inconvenience for the maximum of travelers."

The two political parties have sought for weeks to avoid blame for any public inconvenience that results from the budget cuts, known in Washington-speak as a sequester, and it's likely they will accelerate their efforts as the cuts begin to bite.

So far, much of the back and forth has focused on relatively minor matters, including the decision to cancel White House tours and House Speaker John Boehner's periodic reminders to the public that the Capitol is open as usual for out-of-towners to visit.

By contrast, hundreds of thousands of federal employees face unpaid furloughs beginning next month.

___ Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A woman and her 4-year-old daughter who were reported missing last week have been found safe in central Missouri, and the mother faces charges of faking their abduction, a sheriff said early Tuesday.

Rachel Koechner, 28, and her daughter, Zoee Sandner, had last been seen Thursday in the Brookfield area, about 100 miles northwest of Kansas City, and were reported missing that night after her boyfriend received a text message from her that read, "help me."

Authorities believed Koechner and Zoee were with her ex-husband, Devon Sandner, 37, who is Zoee's father, and that they could be in danger because of a history of domestic violence, Chariton County Sheriff Chris Hughes said.

Those concerns were compounded when Koechner reached out to her boyfriend from a motel in the Kansas City suburb of Blue Springs on Monday.

"She called her boyfriend and said everything is OK, but it sounded like she was reading off a script," Hughes said.

Linn County sheriff's police and Missouri State Highway Patrol officers located all three about 10 p.m. Monday at a home in Linn County, just north of Brookfield. Hughes would not say whose home, but stressed that no one was injured.

"It's a very unfortunate situation, but the good thing is everyone is safe," Hughes said.

Koechner was taken into custody and was being held in Chariton County Jail pending charges.

"Through investigation police learned she fabricated the (abduction) story," Hughes said. He provided no details.

Sandner was not charged in connection with Koechner and Zoee's disappearance, but was taken into custody on an outstanding forgery warrant, Hughes said. The child was placed in state custody.

When Hughes called the Blue Springs motel later on Monday to find out if Koechner was there, a motel worker said she was standing at the check-out desk and handed her he phone.

"She said she couldn't talk now," Hughes said. "I asked if she was OK, and she said, `No.'"

By the time Blue Springs police arrived at the motel, Koechner was gone.

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NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — A plan to seize up to 10 percent of savings accounts in Cyprus to help pay for a €15.8 billion financial bailout was met with fury Monday, and the government shut down banks until later this week while lawmakers wrangled over how to keep the island nation from bankruptcy.

Though the euro and stock prices of European banks fell, global financial markets largely remained calm, and there was little sense that bank account holders elsewhere across the continent faced similar risk. Asian stock markets rose Tuesday, shaking off jitters sparked by Cyprus' financial crisis.

Political leaders in Cyprus scrambled to devise a new plan that would not be so burdensome for people with less than €100,000 in the bank.

The authorities delayed a parliamentary vote on the seizure of €5.8 billion and ordered banks to remain shut until Thursday while they try to modify the deal, which must be approved by other eurozone governments. Once a deal is in place, they will be ready to lend Cyprus €10 billion ($13 billion) in rescue loans.

A rejection of the package could see the country go bankrupt and possibly drop out of the euro currency — an outcome that would be even more damaging to financial markets' confidence.

Even while playing down the chance of fresh market turmoil, experts warned that the surprise move broke an important taboo against making depositors pay for Europe's bailouts. As a result, it may have longer-term consequences for confidence in Europe's banking system — and its ability to end its financial crisis.

"It's a precedent for all European countries. Their money in every bank is not safe," said lawyer Simos Angelides at an angry protest outside parliament in Cyprus' capital, Nicosia, where people chanted, "Thieves, thieves!"

Eurozone finance ministers held a telephone conference Monday night, and concluded that small depositors should not be hit as hard as others. They said the Cypriot authorities will stagger the deposit seizures more, but they remained firm in demanding that the overall sum of money raised by the seizures remain the same.

In the short term, there was little sign of a new explosion in the European financial crisis. Stock markets dropped in early hours but stabilized by the close. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 62.05 points, or 0.4 percent, to 14,452.06 Monday. The euro fell 0.6 percent — a bad day, but hardly a token of impending doom. Government bond prices for Italy and Spain were roughly unchanged, suggesting that investors do not expect the market trouble to spread beyond Cyprus for now.

In Asia, most benchmarks rose modestly Tuesday while Japan's Nikkei 225 index jumped 2 percent to 12,467.18.

In part, that may be due to the fact that Cyprus' case is by many measures an exception.

The decision to hit deposits up to €100,000 ($129,290) — the deposit insurance limit in Cyprus — with a 6.75 percent tax and those above that with a 9.9 percent tax was dictated partly by the unusual qualities of the country's financial system.

Cyprus, with only 0.2 percent of the eurozone economy, has a bloated banking system seven times the size of the island's economy. Losses on Greek government bonds had crippled Cypriot banks and required government money to bail them out. Meanwhile, a large proportion of deposits — 37 percent — come from people outside Cyprus and the European Union, much of it from Russia.

European leaders wanted to limit the size of the rescue loans — which are backed by European taxpayers — to €10 billion. Leaders were also reluctant to bail out Russian depositors whose funds may be the result of tax evasion, crime or money laundering.

Dario Perkins, an analyst at Lombard Street Research, noted that "the German government couldn't be seen bailing out Russian mafiosi just before an election."

He said the bailout also showed that European leaders were willing to decisively confront Cyprus' problem — rather than postponing the day of reckoning with a partial solution. "On one level, you could argue this deal is good news," he wrote in a note to investors.

Officials say by tapping the depositors, they are reducing the total amount of debt taken on by the government, keeping it to a high but manageable 100 percent of GDP by 2020. That will mean less-painful austerity cutbacks than those that were imposed on Greece as a condition of its loans. Partly as a result, Greece is in the sixth year of recession.

Markets have been more resistant to new shocks since the European Central Bank's offer to purchase the bonds of indebted countries, lowering their borrowing costs. No bonds have been bought, but the offer's mere existence has calmed markets and left the eurozone far more resilient than it was a year ago. Last month's indecisive election in heavily indebted Italy, for instance, ruffled the market for only a day or two. Such fears were shortly dismissed by ECB President Mario Draghi as only "the angst of the week."

European authorities, meanwhile, have ways to defuse bank runs, should they occur. If depositors start withdrawing money, the ECB and national central banks can replace the funds with cheap credit through their emergency lending programs — so long as the banks have securities to put up as collateral.

But down the road, the Cyprus precedent, even if quickly reversed, could come back to haunt eurozone policy makers by making depositors less sure about the safety of their money in case of trouble. It could also complicate creation of an EU-wide system of bank deposit insurance, part of long-term efforts to create a more robust financial system and prevent future crises.

Technically, the national deposit insurance scheme remains intact. The money is being taken as a one-time tax — little comfort to those who thought their money was safe. If another eurozone country runs into a banking crisis, a run on the banks there will be more likely.

"The damage is done," said Louise Cooper, who heads financial research firm CooperCity in London. "Europeans now know that their savings could be used to bail out banks."

The deal adds uncertainty for depositors and investors because it underlines to ordinary people that there is no EU-wide deposit guarantee. Insuring deposits is a national responsibility — and can only be done when the government has the money.

"Basically, Cyprus has not honored, at least as of Saturday morning, an obligation that is enshrined in EU legislation," said Nicholas Veron, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "It clearly has consequences because I think there is a very clear message to depositors in Europe.

"It will not affect their behavior immediately, but it might affect their behavior in a future crisis," he said.

__ McHugh reported from Frankfurt, Germany. AP Business Writer Sarah Di Lorenzo in Paris contributed to this report.