Budget reconciliation

Reconciliation begins with a budget resolution instructing named committees to produce legislation changing spending, revenue, or the debt limit by specified amounts. The resulting bill is privileged: debate is limited, so cloture is not required and it passes the Senate on a simple majority. That single property makes it the vehicle for most major fiscal legislation of the past several decades.

The constraint is subject matter. Under what is known as the Byrd rule, provisions whose budgetary effect is merely incidental to a policy change can be struck from the bill in the Senate, and the parliamentarian's rulings on which provisions survive frequently determine what a bill finally contains. Coverage of a reconciliation bill is therefore often coverage of what was removed from it.

Reconciliation is also limited in frequency, tied to budget resolutions rather than available at will, and provisions are commonly written to expire so the bill does not increase deficits beyond the budget window. Those sunset dates are a recurring source of later legislative crises, which is why they are worth noting when a bill passes rather than when it expires. The underlying spending still requires appropriations to be usable.