April 10, 2025: Congress took a big step to move Trump’s agenda, but it’s got a long way to go
Good afternoon, all,
This morning, the House signed off on a Senate-approved framework for President Trump’s legislative agenda—TL;DR, the House and Senate finally agreed to an outline for the “big, beautiful bill” the President’s been asking for. Now they can fill that outline in.
In past updates, we’ve talked about what the President and GOP-controlled Congress want to do: renew and expand corporate-friendly tax policies from the first Trump Administration; greenlight hundreds of billions of dollars for the Pentagon and deportations; and defund programs like Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 70 million Americans.
Today, I’m going to focus not on policy but on process—and how the length of that process could spell success or failure for the GOP’s agenda.
Step one is done—sort of
It’s taken awhile for Republicans in Congress to even get to this first real step in the reconciliation process, as we’ve discussed previously.
But while they’ve seemingly cleared the first major hurdle on the path to reconciliation, their path forward may be more complicated than it’s been for past reconciliation efforts.
As a reminder: the House and Senate have now approved instructions that direct specific House and Senate committees to craft portions of what will ultimately be one reconciliation package. Those instructions also tell each committee how much federal money to cut or spend.
But remember: the House and Senate have given different instructions to their respective committees. For example, the Senate Armed Services Committee is told to spend $50 billion more than its House counterpart.
Republican leaders did this to placate their chambers’ various factions: on the whole, House Republicans want to make deeper cuts and spend less than the Senate does. Including two sets of instructions to committees in this budget resolution allowed leaders to have their cake and eat it, too. They can point to the potential for less draconian cuts to placate some members, while pointing out the possibility of deeper cuts to satisfy fiscal hardliners.
That sleight of hand almost tanked today’s vote, but the Senate Majority Leader’s less-than-full-throated endorsement of the more draconian cuts appears to have satisfied the GOP’s budget hawks. For now.
Here’s the problem Republicans in Congress will eventually have to face: the House and Senate must resolve their differences to get a bill signed into law. Recent reconciliation efforts did not have this issue: the budget resolution the chambers passed at this point in the process contained a single set of instructions—and, therefore, had fewer disputes to resolve later.
GOP leaders have delayed a reckoning, but they have not avoided one. Resolving their budget disputes could prolong the next steps in the reconciliation process—and that could be a big problem for the entire enterprise.
What we can learn from reconciliation bills past/passed
To forecast what’s in store for this reconciliation effort, it’s helpful to look at other recent ones. Conveniently, we have examples from the last two presidents’ first years in office, and they all hint at a big indicator of reconciliation bills’ prospects: how long they take.
In 2017, Republicans controlled the White House, House, and Senate, and attempted to pass two major agenda items via reconciliation: repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and tax reforms that disproportionately benefitted the wealthy and corporations. The former failed to become law, while the latter succeeded.
Similarly, in 2021, Democrats controlled the White House, House, and Senate and they used reconciliation twice to advance massive responses to the COVID pandemic and the corresponding economic fallout. The first attempt (the American Rescue Plan) passed, while the second (the Build Back Better Act) did not.
What do these examples have in common? The bills that moved quickly passed, while those that moved slowly did not.
When Republicans tried to repeal the ACA, the budget resolution kicking off that process had passed both the House and Senate by January 13, 2017, before President Trump was even inaugurated. The Senate vote sinking that effort was on July 28.
Contrast this with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The budget resolution commencing that reconciliation process was through the House and Senate by October 26, 2017. President Trump signed the final package into law on December 22, less than two months later.
The examples from President Biden’s first year tell a similar story. The budget resolution teeing up the American Rescue Plan had the House and Senate’s OK by February 5, 2021. President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law just over a month later on March 11. Conversely, Congress took its first step to move Build Back Better on August 24, 2021 before spending nearly four months crafting the legislation. Talks eventually ended unsuccessfully on December 19.
Why recent reconciliation bills aged like milk
The last two presidents spent their first years in office trying to pass major priorities via reconciliation—and, in both administrations, we saw an inverse relationship between how long a big legislative push takes and its likelihood of passing.
Are there unique circumstances surrounding each of the examples above? Of course. But the fact remains that if you’re using reconciliation to accomplish your goals, it behooves you to do it quickly.
Why is time a threat to reconciliation’s success? Let’s again look at ACA repeal, an effort that lasted more than six months. Those six months allowed for a robust public education campaign to ensure the public understood how ACA repeal would affect them, followed by a tremendous grassroots movement advocating for Congress to protect the health care law—successfully.
The passage of time alone does not guarantee a reconciliation push fails: it’s how people use that time.
The more time it takes to craft a reconciliation package, the more time reporters and analysts have to dissect its impacts and share that information with the public, and the more time folks who oppose your agenda have to mobilize—whether that’s a people-powered effort like the one to preserve the ACA, or corporate lobbying to defeat Build Back Better.
Bottom line: the longer Republicans in Congress take to move their reconciliation package, the more time there is to defeat it. And given all the unresolved budgetary issues we discussed above, it’s looking like this could take awhile.