What’s next for the ‘One, Big, Beautiful Bill?’

On Thursday, House Republicans narrowly passed the same Joint Budget Resolution (H. Con. Res. 14) that the Senate passed last week, a necessary step in being able to use the reconciliation process to implement President Trump’s America First agenda. As long as they follow the rules laid out in the Congressional Budget Act for use of reconciliation, Republicans can avoid having to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, meaning they would just need simple majorities in both the House and Senate to pass their big policy bill.

Here’s what to know about the next step in the reconciliation process:

The concurrent budget resolution that both chambers have now passed includes reconciliation instructions. According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget, reconciliation instructions “identify the legislative committee(s) tasked with reconciliation, the dollar amount of budgetary changes that must be achieved over designated time frames (usually the first year of the budget and the five- or ten-year period covered by the budget resolution) that the committee(s) must achieve, and the date by which the committee(s) should report reconciliation legislation.”

The instructions, in this case, also direct the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee to report legislation to change the limit on the public debt in accordance with the spending levels in the budget resolution.

The budget resolution that was just passed set specific dollar targets for specific committees to achieve, but these are non-binding, and the respective committees decide how these spending/spending reduction targets are met.

It’s important to note that the instructions this budget resolution provides for the House are not the same as those for the Senate. Generally speaking, the resolution allows the Senate to incur more debt and produce fewer savings, while the House will aim for far greater savings and less debt. This strategy, GOP leaders have said, is intended to give lawmakers flexibility in figuring out how to meet the president’s policy goals. In the end, however, they will have to agree on one set of numbers and one approach for the final package.

It’s also important to note that Senate Republicans are using what Democrats say is a gimmick, “current policy baseline,” to hide the actual cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Republicans say, since the TCJA is current policy, there should be no new ‘cost’ to continuing it into the future. Democrats say the TCJA law itself made the tax cuts temporary, with an expiration date at the end of 2025; thus, extending them would mean government revenues would be less (almost $4 trillion less) than if they were allowed to expire. The proof that Republicans understand ‘current policy baseline’ is simply an accounting trick, Democrats say, is the fact that the reconciliation instructions allow for a $4 to $5 trillion debt limit increase, which would be the largest specified increase in history, according to the CFRB.