On February 13, the House Committee on the Budget passed House Republicans’ proposed budget resolution for FY 2025, including provisions that would trigger the budget reconciliation process.
What is budget reconciliation, anyway? Budget reconciliation is a legislative process that Congress can use once per fiscal year to pass legislative provisions affecting federal revenue without having to clear the 60-vote threshold to end a Senate filibuster.
The new House budget resolution calls for House Committees to make policy recommendations that would reduce spending for programs within their jurisdictions, including the House Committee on Education and Workforce which has been instructed to craft policy to generate $330 billion in savings. These cuts could include placing caps on student loan borrowing, enacting institutional risk sharing policies, and reforming federal student loan payment programs to generate such savings (more here from our most recent survey of Insiders).
During the same week, the Senate Budget Committee passed its own budget resolution, including similar provisions that would trigger the reconciliation process that would require the House Committee on Education and Workforce and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) to reduce spending for programs within their jurisdiction by $1 billion dollars.
What’s next: In order to begin the budget reconciliation process in earnest, House and Senate Republicans will have to coalesce around one version of the budget resolution, forcing Republicans to reconcile the Senate’s narrower budget resolution focused primarily on energy, defense, and border security policy with the House’ more expansive proposal to use the reconciliation process to extend/pass new tax cuts.
