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  • The Power of One

    Manish Naik

    Director of Legislative Services

    While much of the recent attention on Washington has focused on the actions of President Trump during his first few weeks in office, the new 119th Congress also convened in January with one long to-do list for the first session. The list includes things they have to deal with soon, like raising the debt ceiling, approving disaster aid for the California wildfires and last year’s devastating floods, and finalizing appropriations for federal FY 2025, which will determine how much funding schools get for Title I, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and other federal programs in the upcoming 2025-26 school year.

    The to-do list also includes things the new Republican majority, operating under one party rule for the first time since 2018, want to do, like extending tax cuts from the first Trump presidency, increasing border security and defense spending, and enacting other priorities of the new Administration that require congressional approval. These proposals have little Democratic support and have to occur through budget reconciliation, a fast-track legislative process which can only be used once per fiscal year and only requires a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the usual 60 votes for approval.

    Bipartisan agreement is needed for legislation addressing the debt ceiling, disaster relief, and appropriations, so progress on those issues has been slow. More congressional attention has been given to reconciliation, with the president promoting his interest in “one, big, beautiful bill” that contains all of his Administration’s priorities. House and Senate Republican leaders have differed on whether this approach is feasible and spent the early weeks of the first session debating whether to plan on doing one bill with all of the priorities now or attempting two reconciliation bills – one in the current fiscal year and one after October 1 when the next fiscal year begins.

    This debate lasted most of the first month of the 119th Congress. In mid-February, the Senate moved on the one-now-one-later approach, taking about one week to pass a budget resolution out of committee and then on the floor. With only one exception, all Republicans supported the Senate’s budget resolution, a blueprint that provides reconciliation instructions to the relevant committees that will develop cuts and increases for specific programs. The measure is focused on new spending for border security, immigration enforcement, and defense, while extensions of the 2017 tax cuts, as well as the enormous funding cuts that will be necessary to partially or fully offset the cost of tax cuts and new spending, were excluded from the budget resolution and planned for the second bill in the next fiscal year.

    Spurred into action by the Senate, the House introduced their budget resolution, which rolled all of the new spending, funding cuts, and even an increase in the debt ceiling, into one bill. The bulk of the additional cost of the House budget resolution would come from an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, with the Ways and Means Committee given instructions to increase spending by $4.5 trillion. The largest cuts are assigned to the committees for Energy and Commerce, Education and Workforce, and Agriculture. The programs that were not explicitly named in the House blueprint but widely discussed as being targeted for cuts by those committees include Medicaid, higher education student loans, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food assistance grants. Any possible changes to Child Nutrition Program eligibility, as well as the Medicaid cuts, would greatly harm school districts’ ability to provide essential health, education, and nutrition services, particularly for low-income children and eligible students with disabilities.

    In late February, a narrowly divided House approved its budget resolution by a vote of 217-215. One Republican joined all Democrats in voting against the budget resolution, with one additional Democrat unavailable to cast a vote. House and Senate Republican leaders must now decide on one budget resolution in order to provide the relevant committees with their reconciliation instructions.

    If neither chamber is going to adopt the other’s budget resolution, then the House and Senate will need to negotiate one new budget resolution to proceed. It is possible for both chambers to simply continue on their separate reconciliation tracks, but eventually a single budget resolution needs to be passed in order for the Senate to bypass their 60 vote requirement for consideration of a budget reconciliation bill.  

    In the meantime, Congress still has to contend with the looming deadlines for last year’s unfinished appropriation bills and a debt limit default. Lack of bipartisan progress on appropriations has led to more discussion about the possibility of a government shutdown in mid-March. One consideration to avoid that scenario would be the passage of a full-year Continuing Resolution (CR), where all of the individual appropriations bills are rolled into one year-long extension at last year’s funding levels. Whether sufficient support exists for a full-year CR, and whether consideration of the debt ceiling and disaster relief would be included in such a package, remains to be seen. Stay tuned to see if the 119th Congress is able to move forward and get one thing done.