Reconciliation and rescissions roil Congress

The threat of being kept after school if you hadn't completed your homework was a motivator back in my high school days. Apparently, it doesn't work on adults in Congress.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) threatened to keep the upper body in session on Juneteenth and through the weekend if necessary to complete action on President Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act,' also known as the fiscal 2025 reconciliation bill.
Senate Republicans emerged from their conference on Monday evening after being briefed on what changes the Finance Committee had made in the House-passed bill. They seemed just as divided as they were when they went into the meeting, primarily over cuts in Medicaid benefits, tax cut issues, and various smaller items tucked away in the 1,000 plus page measure (little jagged gems are still being discovered by close readers). The prospect of missing an extended weekend back home was not sufficient to spur immediate action.
The larger issue looming over both the House-passed and Senate-tweaked bills is whether they provide steep enough cuts to make a real difference in the deficit. Disgruntled House Republicans are outraged that the bill, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, would actually increase the deficit over the next decade rather that reduce it.
The president's Office of Management and Budget disagrees with that assessment and scores the measure overall as a deficit reducer. The battle of the scorekeepers rages on with predictable arguments being made by both sides.
Reconciliation is an obscure term plucked by the drafters of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act to accomplish a very simple objective, at least on paper. The two houses adopt a budget resolution for the coming fiscal year. It is a concurrent resolution on the budget with no force or effect in law — an aspirational goal of Congress on what it wants the federal government's fiscal status to look like.
The congressional budget does have real consequences, though, once that framework is fleshed out. The regular appropriations process complies with the budget through caps on discretionary spending. In addition, reconciliation instructions to authorizing committees may direct changes in existing laws to either increase or reduce the amount of spending needed to achieve the budget resolution's goals, so-called mandatory spending, mainly in taxes and entitlements.
And therein lies the rub, since a handful of members in both chambers have strong objections to particular items in the House-passed bill. The original aim was to complete action on reconciliation by the July Fourth recess, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) thinks that deadline will now slip to later in the month.
The fourth leg of the budgetary process is rescission. In the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act, rescissions became the impoundment tool of presidents. If the president wants to withhold or cancel appropriations that have been enacted, he must submit a rescission request to Congress. If it approves the request within 45 days, the spending is cancelled. If not, the spending goes forward.
President Trump, on May 30, submitted a $9.4 billion rescission request to the Hill. The House passed the rescission bill narrowly last week. The Senate will take it up after it completes action on reconciliation. In his first term, Trump proposed $15 billion in rescissions. The Senate rejected the entire package.
The Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, has just released a report finding the Trump administration has violated the law by rescinding funds for The Institute of Museums and Library Services without seeking the approval of Congress. Earlier this year, the agency made the same finding about the administration's cancellation of the $5 billion program for electric vehicle charging stations, again without seeking Congress's go-ahead.
The Government Accountability Office indicated earlier this year that it is inquiring into over three dozen unilateral funding cuts by the administration, most of which originated with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. There are those in the administration who do not think rescission bills are necessary because, they argue, the president already has unilateral authority to withhold funding as he sees fit without congressional approval. Moreover, they think the entire budget act is unconstitutional.
This underlying dispute ultimately will be resolved by the Supreme Court. Until then, the administration is considering whether and how to complete its homework assignment by trying to put as many DOGE cuts as it can on the right side of the law with additional rescission requests. And Congress should ensure it completes its fiscal 2025 budget process assignment before time runs out on Sept. 30.
Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran culminating as chief-of-staff of the House Rules Committee in 1995. He is author of, 'Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial' (2000), and, 'Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays' (2018).

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