Council of the Great City Schools

Unified Control of Congress, Kind Of

By Manish Naik

Director of Legislative Services

The November elections of 2024 resulted in a significant shift in federal leadership. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency, combined with a new Republican majority in the Senate joining the Republican-led House, changed the governing dynamic in Washington. The current 119^th Congress, which began in January 2025, has Republican majorities in both chambers for the first time since 2018 during President Trump’s first term.

The recently concluded 118^th Congress, with a Democratic Senate and Republican House, was notable mainly for its lack of productivity. Congress only passed about 150 bills during that two-year session, down from more than 350 passed in the 117^th Congress when Democrats held control of both chambers and the White House. While split control of Congress and the White House can account for much of the disparity, even the previously unproductive 112^th and 113^th sessions of Congress, when Republicans controlled the House and clashed with Democratic President Barack Obama, passed more than 270 bills in each of those sessions.

With a Republican majority leading the House and Senate, and a Trump Administration back in the White House, it was clear that budget reconciliation would be used to try and approve the Republican priorities for border security, defense, tax cuts, and energy deregulation. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s challenge in the 119^th Congress will be to prove that the lack of legislative productivity was the result of split partisan control and not GOP disarray. The slim Republican majority in the House will afford the Speaker only minimal defections on party-line legislation as leadership attempts to approve major pieces of the President’s agenda.

Speaker Johnson successfully cleared some initial legislative hurdles, keeping most of his caucus in line as the House passed a full-year Continuing Resolution for FY 2025 and a budget resolution that kicks off the reconciliation process. Speaker Johnson’s biggest test still lies ahead, however, as the House and Senate majorities continue to have different visions for a final budget reconciliation bill.

Initially, the debate involved two options: doing one large reconciliation bill in the current 2025 fiscal year that includes all of the priorities or splitting the policy provisions into two bills with one completed in FY 2025 and another in federal FY 2026. Senate Republicans preferred the two bill approach while House leaders, recognizing the challenges of passing legislation with their extremely thin majority, signaled a preference for including all reconciliation items in one bill.

Each chamber initially passed a budget resolution that reflected these preferences. The House approved a budget resolution in February that sought a net of $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over ten years, increased spending on border security, immigration, and defense, requested at least $1.5 trillion in federal spending cuts primarily through Medicaid reductions, and raised the debt ceiling. The Senate-approved budget resolution, by comparison, focused only on border security, defense, and energy costs, authorizing up to $515 billion in new spending over ten years.

After no intra-party consensus was reached on how to resolve the differences, but still needing a single budget resolution to move forward on reconciliation, the House and Senate both approved a new budget resolution that established different targets in each chamber. The new budget resolution basically included two different budget resolutions in one, with different instructions for what the House and Senate committees must produce. House committees were instructed to increase deficits by only $2.3 trillion, so while their tax cut proposals will increase spending, their members focused on deficit-reduction can offset these new costs somewhat with expected cuts to Medicaid. Senate committees, on the other hand, are instructed to increase deficits by what amounts to $5.8 trillion, with Republicans in that chamber authorized to approve only minimal budget cuts, due to more members who are reluctant to pay for the tax proposals with reductions to Medicaid.

Since the start of the 119^th Congress this year, school districts have been pressing members of Congress in both the Senate and House to reject cuts to Medicaid that will impact health and education services provided to low-income children and students with disabilities. The split between the House and Senate majorities presents a good opportunity to block or limit reductions in the Medicaid program. Whether the reconciliation changes are outright cuts or billed as savings, reforms, or efficiencies, any reduction in federal Medicaid funding will push responsibility for health care costs onto States and threaten the availability of reimbursements for school districts.