Fix Reconciliation: How Congress Can Stop Using Budget Rules To Bust The Deficit

This year offered stark reminders of how congressional procedures can amplify partisan outcomes — and how those procedures can be fixed. Lawmakers emerged from a long government shutdown and then used the budget tool known as "reconciliation" to pass a partisan tax package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that the Congressional Budget Office says will add more than $3 trillion to the federal deficit over ten years.

Why Reconciliation Matters

Most legislation in the 100-member Senate can be blocked by a filibuster, forcing the majority to reach a 60-vote supermajority. Reconciliation, however, provides an expedited, filibuster-free route to enact specific budget changes — large shifts in taxes and spending — making it especially attractive to a governing party that lacks 60 votes.

How The Process Was Used This Year

Reconciliation is supposed to be limited to budgetary adjustments and constrained by procedural rules. The Senate parliamentarian determines — often behind closed doors — whether a provision is genuinely about the budget or merely a policy change with incidental budget effects. Those judgments can profoundly shape what majorities can accomplish.

Another constraint is the budget window: reconciliation bills traditionally cannot increase deficits outside a conventional ten-year horizon. But the chair of the Budget Committee controls key scoring assumptions. This year, Republicans measured the bill's cost against "current policy" — treating preexisting tax cuts as if they would continue — rather than against "current law," which assumed those cuts would expire. That change dramatically understated the bill's cost within the ten-year window and enabled larger deficit increases through reconciliation.

Practical Reforms To Restore Fiscal Discipline

To make reconciliation a tool for responsible budgeting rather than partisan deficit-expansion, I recommend the following reforms:

• Limit Reconciliation To Deficit-Reducing Measures. Reconciliation should be a filibuster-free mechanism used to improve the budget balance — historically its primary purpose — not to pursue large, partisan increases in deficits.
• Score Against Current Law, Not Current Policy. The law should require deficit impacts to be measured relative to current law so that temporary expirations and scheduled changes are reflected accurately.
• Keep A Ten-Year Budget Window. Maintain the conventional ten-year horizon for assessing reconciliation impacts to preserve transparency and comparability.
• Allow Automatic Triggers. Reconciliation bills should be permitted to include automatic adjustments (triggers) that scale taxes or spending if projected targets are missed, reducing reliance on uncertain forecasts.
• Allow Limited Policy Flexibility For Big Deficit Cutters. Large deficit-reduction bills could be granted limited leeway to include provisions that further non-budgetary goals, provided those provisions make direct tax or spending changes rather than indirect policy moves.
• Publish Parliamentarian Rulings. All rulings and the reasoning of the Senate parliamentarian should be released in writing and made public to increase transparency and accountability.
• Restore Ordinary Bill Titles. For clarity and public comprehension, bills should be allowed normal, recognizable short titles again.

What This Would Achieve

These technical reforms will not cure the deep political divisions that make governing difficult. But they would reduce incentives to use reconciliation to pursue partisan legislation that meaningfully worsens the fiscal outlook. By returning reconciliation to a vehicle for fiscal responsibility, Congress can make one aspect of lawmaking less prone to partisan gamesmanship.

Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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