What is budget reconciliation?
Budget reconciliation is a special legislative process in the United States Congress that allows certain budget-related bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority vote, rather than the 60 votes generally needed to overcome a filibuster, subject to specific procedural rules limiting what the bill may contain.
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Core tenets
- Simple-majority Senate passage
- A reconciliation bill can pass the Senate with 51 votes, or 50 plus the vice president's tie-breaking vote, rather than the 60 votes typically required for ordinary legislation.
- Requires a budget resolution first
- Reconciliation instructions must originate from a budget resolution passed earlier in the process, directing specific committees to produce legislation meeting defined budgetary targets.
- Content limited by the Byrd rule
- Provisions in a reconciliation bill must have a primarily budgetary effect; provisions found to be merely incidental to the budget can be stripped out under the Byrd rule.
How it works in practice
Reconciliation has become a significant vehicle for major fiscal legislation specifically because it avoids the Senate's usual 60-vote threshold.
- Budget resolution
- Congress first passes a budget resolution containing reconciliation instructions to relevant committees.
- Byrd rule enforcement
- Provisions challenged as non-budgetary can be removed from the bill through a point of order under the Byrd rule, requiring 60 votes to waive.
What it is often confused with
Budget reconciliation is often confused with the ordinary appropriations process; reconciliation concerns changes to mandatory spending, revenue, and the debt limit under special majority-vote rules, while appropriations bills fund annual discretionary government operations through the regular process.
Criticisms and debates
Criticism of budget reconciliation centers on whether using it for major policy changes circumvents the deliberative purpose of the Senate's usual supermajority requirement.
Circumvention critique
Argues that using reconciliation to pass major, non-budgetary policy changes stretches a process intended for narrow budgetary matters into a general workaround for the filibuster.
Response: Defenders of using reconciliation for major legislation argue that if a policy has genuine majority support and a defensible budgetary effect, using an available legislative process to pass it is legitimate, not a circumvention.
Byrd rule limitation critique
Notes that the Byrd rule's requirement that provisions be primarily budgetary has forced significant policy provisions to be stripped from reconciliation bills, limiting what can actually be accomplished through the process.
Response: Supporters of the Byrd rule argue this limitation is the entire point, keeping reconciliation focused on budgetary matters rather than becoming an unlimited majority-vote legislative tool.
Historical examples
- Affordable Care Act reconciliation provisions, 2010
- Certain amendments to the Affordable Care Act were passed through reconciliation after the underlying law passed through regular order.
- Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 2017
- A major tax law passed through the reconciliation process, allowing Senate passage with a simple majority.
Sources
- 1.Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
- 2.Congressional Research Service. The Budget Reconciliation Process.
- 3.Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reconciliation (United States Congress).