With President Donald Trump’s second administration just weeks away, congressional Republicans are gearing up to execute on a wide-ranging legislative agenda touching on everything from taxes to immigration to fossil fuels. In a Monday interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump noted that his preference for doing so was “one big, beautiful bill,” but said he’d be open to two.
To accomplish that, Republicans intend to use a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows them to approve budget-related legislation with a simple majority in the Senate. Doing so enables them to bypass filibuster rules, which would otherwise require a bill to garner 60 votes to advance in the upper chamber. (In this case, with the Senate divided 53-47 in favor of Republicans, passing a bill through normal order would also require Democratic votes.)
There’s a catch for using this process, though, and it could become a major roadblock to parts of Trump’s agenda. As the name suggests, budget reconciliation is only intended to advance policies — such as spending and tax measures — that have a significant effect on the budget and not just an incidental one. Additionally, a restriction called the Byrd rule says that policies included in a budget reconciliation package aren’t supposed to affect Social Security or add to the deficit after 10 years. Provisions that don’t meet these standards typically get stripped out following an intensive review process, an outcome that has stymied both parties in the past.
Review of the legislation is done by congressional experts, including the Senate parliamentarian — a nonpartisan official who advises on the interpretation of congressional rules — to determine whether a bill meets these parameters. Lawmakers have the option to ignore the parliamentarian’s judgments, but it’s not common, and new Senate Majority Leader John Thune has already said Republicans should not do so.
There’s still a lot that lawmakers can do using reconciliation. In 2022, Democrats were able to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which included expansive clean energy tax credits, and in 2021, they approved the American Rescue Plan, which included Covid-19 aid and an expanded child tax credit.
In 2017, Republicans similarly advanced the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act using this process, and will likely look to extend those tax cuts in their upcoming package.
Other policies aren’t likely to pass muster if their primary impact isn’t budgetary, however. That was previously the case when Democrats tried to include a federal $15 minimum wage in the American Rescue Plan, and when they attempted to include a path to citizenship for DACA recipients in a version of the Build Back Better bill. Both were removed following the parliamentarian’s ruling, and the same could be done in a prospective Republican bill, including on issues like immigration and energy, to measures that aren’t primarily focused on spending and taxation.
Tax cuts and efforts to roll back tax credits are among the policies that have been approved via reconciliation in the past and that are likely to have limited issues moving forward via this process again. In this case, that would include GOP plans to extend the tax cuts the party passed in 2017, such as changes to individual tax brackets and business deductions. It also includes potential efforts to repeal clean energy tax credits that Democrats approved as part of the IRA in 2022, including tax credits for electric vehicles.
“Any tax cut — as long as it isn’t to Social Security and as long as it doesn’t add to the deficit beyond the decade — is fair game,” Marc Goldwein, the senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told Vox. “The entire Inflation Reduction Act was done through reconciliation, and it could be reversed through reconciliation or modified through reconciliation.”
Policies that include more spending for immigration-related purposes — as long as they don’t touch discretionary funds — would likely be fine as well, Goldwein said. Republicans are constrained when it comes to passing new immigration policies using reconciliation, but they could, for instance, allocate more spending for a border wall, border patrol agents, and detention of immigrants at the border.
“Additional funds for various purposes — e.g. construction of the wall — have been deemed valid by the parliamentarian, since the spending is the primary purpose of the provision,” says Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act would be one good example of this type of provision.”
In the IRA, Democrats included $80 billion in mandatory spending for the IRS, distributed over roughly a decade. Republicans could incorporate a comparable provision on border security and immigration spending this cycle.
Changes to other mandatory spending programs like Medicaid and SNAP are also allowed under reconciliation, Goldwein notes. That means that Republicans could pass provisions like more work requirements for SNAP or changes to Medicaid’s matching rates for different services.
The policies that are less likely to advance through reconciliation are ones that are viewed as primarily accomplishing other policy ends, even if they also have an effect on the budget. These constraints will probably curtail the immigration and energy policies that Republicans are able to incorporate.
In 2021, for example, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determined that Democrats could not include a path to citizenship for DACA recipients — undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children — in a $3.5 trillion version of the Build Back Better bill. Democrats had argued that such efforts would have a significant budgetary impact and allow more immigrants to access social programs, but MacDonough ruled that these effects would be secondary to the main purpose of the law, which was to provide DACA recipients a way to achieve legal status.
In the new Congress, other proposals to alter immigration policy — like past Republican bills to make seeking asylum harder — similarly wouldn’t be possible via reconciliation, says Heidi Altman, the director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center. Attempts to change eligibility for work visas or the number of visas available would also likely face uncertainty, experts told Vox.
“Things that are changing funding for immigration, no problem,” Goldwein said. “Where it gets tricky is when they’re making regulatory changes that have budgetary effects.”
On the energy front, the same logic holds, with regulatory changes more likely to be struck from the bill by the parliamentarian. Republicans have expressed an interest in considering permitting reform — which could expedite approvals for energy and infrastructure projects — as part of reconciliation, though it’s not clear that would gain the parliamentarian’s approval. Rolling back vehicle emissions standards that were set during the Biden administration is also likely to be a contentious inclusion.
Because the Senate largely determines its own rules and norms, lawmakers have the ability to disregard the parliamentarian’s ruling, or to even fire an official they disagree with. It’s not common to do so, however.
Experts note that ignoring the parliamentarian would be a rare and significant break from tradition, and one that the Senate isn’t likely to entertain. In a Monday interview with Punchbowl News, Thune said that overruling the parliamentarian would be “akin to killing the filibuster.”
“We can’t go there,” he told Punchbowl reporter Andrew Desiderio. “People need to understand that.”
The same would be true if lawmakers fired the parliamentarian, which last occurred in 2001 under Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
As things stand, it’s more likely that Republicans will be forced to strip provisions that don’t comply with reconciliation rules, focusing any package heavily on tax cuts, repealing tax credits, and boosting spending for immigration programs — but potentially angering Trump in the process.
“I think the core of it is going to be probably a multi-year, but not permanent, extension of large parts of the [2017 tax cuts] … with some funding for border and some funding for defense, and maybe a couple of additional tax cuts, like no taxes on tips,” Goldwein said.
