WASHINGTON, D.C. -- One fact of life in the minority party in the House of Representatives: having to wait for the other side to set the agenda.

This week, with the decks in Congress largely cleared for work on the nation's financial problems, U.S. Reps. John Olver and Richard Neal were waiting for information.

And then they were preparing to find ways to exert their influence over how public money is raised and spent -- two areas in which they 20-year representatives held ranking committee posts until this January.

(The Longworth House Office Building, left, where U.S. Rep. John Olver has offices.)

Now in the minority, the two Democrats, who represent 148 communities in western Massachusetts and about half the state's land area, have been working with their staffs to see where life here picks up, following Friday's agreement to cut $38.5 billion in government spending in the five and a half months that remain in this fiscal year.

For Olver, a priority remains job creation -- and he's pessimistic about how long it will take an economy that remains shaky to produce a meaningful number of jobs.

"I am very focused on jobs," Olver said in an interview in his office Tuesday afternoon. "In the last three months, it doesn't look to me like we will have produced anything that will stimulate job production."

In his view, the nation's economic recovery could stall, as government spending falls. "I think there's a good chance of it. I think the really dangerous point comes later this year."

Late Tuesday, Neal joined with fellow Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee to talk about one of the next battles on the horizon: U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to tackle deficit reduction in the next budget by going after entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. That's just one of a grab bag of headaches here for members of both parties. On Wednesday, President Obama will attempt to influence how Congress handles the money problems, even as the Treasury stares down a cap on its ability to borrow.

In an interview in his Congressional office Tuesday, Neal (in photo at left) said he plans to challenge the idea that people should be subjected to setbacks in cherished programs.

He planned to question the merits of Ryan's plan in a meeting Wednesday morning of the Ways and Means Committee. "I won't be saying anything good," the congressman said. "I reject the idea that Social Security has anything to do with this deficit -- because it doesn't."

While acknowledging that his constituents support making progress in reducing the deficit and the nation's roughly $14 trillion debt, he predicted they won't go for Ryan's proposal to link Medicare coverage to the use of vouchers that max out at $8,000 a year.

"After $8,000 you're on your own. ... When they (constituents) find out what the cuts are, they're not as happy," he said.