How Does Budget Reconciliation Work?

Once a year, the U.S. government can use a process called reconciliation to fast-track big budget legislation through Congress. Learn how it works in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/reconciliation.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain
Stuff Lauren boglebam here. Passing new legislation in the US
can be well difficult, to say the least, and when
there's a Congress that's all but deadlocked because of razor
thin majorities in the House and Senate, that makes passing

(00:22):
big budget legislation even more problematic. That's where reconciliation comes
into the picture. Budget reconciliation is a way for Congress
to pass major funding bills, which are notoriously difficult to pass,
especially when there is a very evenly divided Senate. It
was created by the Congressional Budget Act of four as

(00:44):
a way to quickly advance these tax and spending bills.
With reconciliation, the party in control of Congress can pass
funding legislation in the Senate, things like taxes, spending, and
debt limits, with a simple majority that is either vote
or fifty votes and the Vice president's tie breaking vote
without the threat of a filibuster. It takes sixty votes

(01:07):
to defeat a filibuster. The Congressional Budget Act also limits
Senate debate on the bill to twenty hours and limits
debate on the compromises between the two houses to ten hours,
which helps the Senate expedite and pass reconciliation bills much faster.
And to start the process, Congress agrees on a budget
resolution that includes a reconciliation directive four specified committees. These

(01:31):
directives instruct the committees on how much to increase or
decrease spending in revenue or how to limit the debt ceiling.
It also provides a deadline for completion. A Congress doesn't
tell the committees how to hit the reconciliation target, just
to hit it. Once the various committees complete their tasks,
the House and Senate budget committees combine the recommendations into

(01:54):
a single omnibus bill, the Reconciliation Bill, and then the
House and Senate vote. Both must obtain a majority to
pass the legislation. Reconciliation bills can include spending changes two items,
such as Medicare, Medicaid, federal civilian and military retirement benefits,
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program a SNAP formerly known as

(02:15):
food stamps, and farm programs. The Social Security is untouchable.
The reconciliation rule allows bills that raise the deficit, but
only for ten years. The Trump tax cuts were passed
fire reconciliation, though the Senate allowed some of the tax
cuts to expire so the bill wouldn't increase the federal
deficit past that ten year window. In addition, the Bird Rule,

(02:40):
named for the late Senator Robert Byrd, who served as
the Democratic Senator for West Virginia for fifty one years,
is intended to keep extraneous policies from being included in
budget reconciliation, and basically it keeps senators from sneaking non
budgetary items into reconciliation. It's up to the Senate parliamentarian
to decide what is and isn't extraneous to the reconciliation.

(03:04):
Important to note, reconciliation can only be used once perfect
school year, and only to change or reconcile laws related
to taxes and spending. Since reconciliation was first introduced in
the Congressional Budget Act of nineteen seventy four, it's been
used twenty one times. Some of its notable uses were

(03:24):
the Trump tax cuts in seventeen, the Bush tax cuts
in two thousand one and two thousand three, Pluton's welfare
program in ninet and major deficit reduction bills in the
nineteen eighties and nineties, the reconciliation process was also used
to pass parts of the Affordable Care Act or a
c A. In and in one, reconciliation was used to

(03:47):
pass President Joe Biden's one point nine trillion dollar COVID
nineteen relief package. Today's episode is based on the article
Reconciliation and Bass tracks massive budget bills through Congress on
how stuff works dot Com. Written by Patty rasmusin brain
Stuff is production of iHeart Radio in partnership with how

(04:08):
stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clay.
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