Back in 2022, Richard Kogan and David Reich of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities helpfully wrote a very detailed article explaining the budget reconciliation process. You should bookmark it.

I mention this because Politico just reported that congressional Republicans have shifted strategies. Originally, the idea was that they would pursue two budget reconciliation bills in 2025 to advance Donald Trump’s agenda. But now they apparently will attempt to get by with only one.

Here’s what I think happened. House Ways & Means chairman Jason Smith (R-Missouri) met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and convinced him that attempting to do two reconciliation bills in a single year was too risky. Trump then called Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and told him to scrap the original plan and pursue “one big beautiful bill.”

But what does any of this mean?

If it feels like I’ve been writing about budget reconciliation for years, that’s because I have, going all that way back to passage of the Affordable Care Act. It’s a parliamentary process that allows the Senate to pass legislation without worrying about the filibuster, and it has been used not only to enact Obamacare but George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and Trump’s tax cuts in 2017.

But it comes with plenty of restrictions. To begin with, it cannot be used to make changes in Social Security. It’s also subject to the Byrd Rule, which allows senators to object to any provision that doesn’t have more than an incidental effect on the budget. And, significantly, it has to go through a committee process:

To start the reconciliation process, the House and Senate must agree on a budget resolution that includes “reconciliation directives” for specified committees. Under the Congressional Budget Act, the House and Senate are supposed to adopt a budget resolution each year to establish an overall budget plan and set guidelines for action on spending and revenue. The Senate may not filibuster consideration of budget resolutions.

There are a couple of important things that flow from this. You might be asking how all this could be done twice in one year. The answer is that it shouldn’t be possible. You can’t have two budgets for a single fiscal year, so how can you have two budget resolutions? The answer is that you can do it if you failed to pass a budget resolution last year. In other words, don’t ask. They can do it because no one gives a shit about intent, only results.

But the need to go through the process of adopting a budget resolution (or two) and then run things through the committee process means that this all takes a lot of time. That’s evidently what had Rep. Jason Smith spooked:

Smith noted that neither party has succeeded in passing two reconciliation bills in the same year in decades. Most recently, congressional Democrats fought among themselves for much of 2021 and into 2022 to enact a second reconciliation package, abandoning much of the policies they envisioned under their “Build Back Better” plan that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Just look at history,” Smith said on Saturday. “The Democrats couldn’t even do it.”

Now, the first consideration here is the desire to deliver a quick win for Trump. They’d like to pass something really substantial before the summer recess. This won’t be easy using reconciliation but it’s possible if the bill can win near unanimity within the Republican House and Senate caucuses. To increase the chances of this happening, the original plan was to leave the harder stuff for later, and put it in a second reconciliation bill.

It might seem counterintuitive, but it appears the Republicans initially felt that it would be easier to do an energy and immigration package right away and then pursue an extension of the expiring Trump tax cuts. But Rep. Smith feared that approach might result in the tax cuts lapsing at the end of the year.

That brings us to the second consideration:

Republicans have major divisions to bridge on tax strategy, and border and energy are viewed as sweeteners to help wrangle GOP votes.

By putting everything in one bill, it really raises the stakes. It forces Republican lawmakers to accept things they don’t like or risk a complete failure to deliver on any of Trump’s major legislative goals. They might not like how the tax bill looks, but rejecting it will mean no energy or immigration bill. Or they might not like parts of the immigration bill but will have to stomach them to keep the tax cuts. When near unanimity is a prerequisite of success, this kind of pressure gives the GOP a better chance of success.

Before I conclude here, I have to add in other factor we have to keep in mind.  It is also possible to do a budget reconciliation bill to raise the debt ceiling. This can be done as a standalone bill, and in addition to a kind of reconciliation bill we’ve been discussing. But the Republicans can’t pass debt ceiling extensions in the House without relying on Democratic votes, and that involves making concessions. In an attempt to avoid this, the Republicans are considering adding a debt ceiling hike into the “one big beautiful bill.” The thinking goes that this is a way to convince House Republican holdouts to authorize more debt. Either they do it, or they sink everything else they want and cripple Trump’s presidency.

But this is really risky because it will only take two or three House Republicans to balk at this tactic to ruin the whole enterprise. And there will be many who will hate this tactic.

It also throws a curveball into the House-leadership-struck agreement to raise the debt ceiling under reconciliation. House GOP leadership told members as part of last year’s government funding negotiations that they would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as part of the first reconciliation package and cut $2.5 trillion in spending as part of the reconciliation process.

In other words, they are supposed to cut a trillion more in spending than they authorize in increased borrowing, but that isn’t going to happen if the bill includes a tax cut extension. Even without the tax cuts, the border provisions will be expensive. Where are all these offsetting cuts coming from? Will they be popular?

The bottom line is that by trying to push through everything they want to do in one big beautiful partisan bill, they create a lot of places for Republican lawmakers to seek off-ramps and greatly reduce their chances of winning any Democratic votes.

The likelihood of total catastrophic failure is very high.