With Appropriations Fight in the Rearview, Congress Turns to Budget Reconciliation

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The Republican majorities in Congress have already taken the first steps to advancing President Trump’s policy agenda by passing a budget resolution in both the House and Senate. However, as the two chambers return to Washington from a weeklong recess, their energy will be focused squarely on resolving the differences in the House and Senate budget resolutions in order to pass a concurrent resolution in both chambers.

The budget resolution provides specific instructions to committees with either spending or savings targets. Committee members and staff—particularly for the Senate Finance and House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committees—have recognized that the instruction in the House-passed for the E&C Committee to provide $880 billion in savings is politically untenable because of the dramatic cuts it would require to federal health programs, especially Medicaid. Staff are working behind closed doors to draft policies that reap savings, then vetting those policies with Republican members to reverse engineer the target savings number to include in a budget resolution. While Republican leadership is projecting confidence in their ability to advance the process in the coming weeks, this behind the scenes consensus-building exercise is likely to take several weeks, if not months, to make concrete progress.

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