Trump’s Best Shot to Get His Agenda Through Congress, Explained

The budget reconciliation process stands as President Donald Trump’s and congressional Republicans’ best—and likely only—hope to pass their agenda through Congress.

While this policymaking mechanism has become more well-known in recent years because recent presidents have used it to get their policies through Congress, the budget reconciliation process is difficult to untangle—even for the seasoned Washington insider.

Budget reconciliation, however, does not evade the understanding of Richard Stern, the director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation. Stern joined me this week on “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss the players, procedures, and policy options on the table as Republicans consider their legislative path forward.

Reconciliation, “is the one shot we have to really get all these things done,” Stern told me. “Really, almost all of the agenda can and should be in this bill.”

“That’s both border security, its interior immigration enforcement, deportations, but it’s also permitting reform, regulatory reform, deregulation, unleashing our energy resources. We could go after the deep state. We could dismantle the deep state if we really wanted to,” Stern said of what could be accomplished in budget reconciliation.

Though there are limitations imposed on what can be done through budget reconciliation, Stern suggested Republicans can go big on it because the Senate can make changes to the rules that govern the reconciliation process—and some of those rules are in dire need of reform.

“Reconciliation started out as a process 50 years ago that was meant to be able to tweak the budget process. In fact, the reason it’s called reconciliation is, it’s supposed to be there to reconcile differences between where the budget is and where you plan for the budget to be,” Stern explained. “But the truth is, the guidelines around it, the restrictions, first, it is actually up to the Senate whether they want to follow them or not. So, at some level, they could just vote to waive whatever rules they want about it. In fact, some of them are already in deep conversation about doing that.”

While reconciliation is part of statute, “the actual reconciliation process [emphasis added] is a rule of the Senate,” Stern explained. “What’s in law is a whole set of requirements around something that is considered privileged as a reconciliation package under Senate rules. The Senate, on the other hand, though, could just vote to amend their rules or waive their rules temporarily to declare something as being privileged as a reconciliation bill so it only needs 50 votes and [Vice President JD] Vance [as potential tiebreaker] and not 60 votes. And they can do that at their discretion because the Constitution demands that both chambers always have the ability with a simple majority vote to change their rules.”

As for other parts of the budget reconciliation process that need retooling, Stern pointed to the limitation placed on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) when evaluating the budgetary impact on policies being considered for reconciliation.

“One of the big things in tax policy is, we want to use dynamic scoring. Dynamic scoring is the simple proposition that we should actually gauge the scoring on tax bills by how much it actually harms or helps the economy. And, at the moment, Congress, both sides of the aisle, force CBO and JCT to do what’s called static scoring, which is the proposition that I can tax the absolute crap out of you and assume that you’re still going to go to work in the morning, even if 100% of your paycheck goes to the federal government,” Stern explained. “That’s the sort of thing right there, where that should be an easy vote. 

“What’s even stupider about this is, when we passed Trump’s tax-cut bill the first time, every economist you could talk to would have told you, ‘There’s going to be almost no deficits from this because it’s so good for growth, it’s so good for increasing people’s incomes, getting more investment in America,’” Stern continued. “And actually, CBO privately said, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what we would think.’ But Congress prohibited us from using a dynamic score.”

“Then a couple months after it was passed, signed into law, their new economic outlook showed massive projected revenue growth, which happened in real life,” he added. “In their economic outlook, they could be honest, but in formal scoring for reconciliation purposes, they couldn’t be honest, and it is because both chambers of Congress simply didn’t want to take the vote to change the rules.”

It’s this “kind of bean-counting litigiousness about reconciliation that feels very much designed to derail the agenda,” he said.

“I think what you find the longer you’re in D.C., and you’re looking at all this, the more you’re on the policy front lines, you realize that the solutions have been around for forever,” Stern told me. “The problem is a lack of willingness to actually tackle it.”

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