Have some sympathy for the headline writers and TV chyron composers trying to describe what's happening on Capitol Hill right now.
Should they just call it the "budget bill" (yawn) or the "mega bill" (one eye opens) or the "gargantuan package deal"?
Many simply succumb and adopt President Trump's phrase "one big, beautiful bill" — the latest testament to his knack for marketing with labels that stick. It's even the proposed official name for the House legislation. (For those with tight space constraints, there's the casual acronym "OBBB.")
Members of Congress or staff can of course fall back on the bill's formal procedural description — budget reconciliation, or just "reconciliation" for short. But it's not hard to understand why talk of "budget reconciliation" is not sweeping the nation.
Nonetheless, everything Trump has poured into this legislative potpourri — from tax and spending cuts to a big Pentagon boost and sprawling policy directives — depends on the package getting special consideration under special rules.
Those rules are only available for budget reconciliation bills, and they make all the difference — the biggest being their exemption from the Senate's practice of allowing unlimited debate, the filibuster.
Normally, the threat of a filibuster means bills need at least 60 votes to get through the Senate. But take away that threat and the majority party can enact even its most ambitious changes to existing policy and law by a simple majority vote. No votes from the opposition are needed.
That has been crucial to enacting key programs for each of the past seven presidents, who have used reconciliation more than two dozen times over the half century since it was created. It was used for crucial parts of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and for Biden's energy and infrastructure initiatives as well as for the deep tax cuts done in the first year of Trump's first term.
But the president who initiated the ambitious use of reconciliation was Ronald Reagan, whose first federal budget was a watershed in the history of federal fiscal policy.
The Reagan Revolution, brought to you by …
The year was 1981, and official Washington was waking up to an unfamiliar landscape. There was a newly inaugurated outsider in the White House determined to move fast and change things. His new budget featured eye-popping increases for the Pentagon alongside deep cuts for social safety net programs.
But looming over all else was a historic reduction in the federal tax on income and capital gains. Sold as being "across the board" with something for taxpayers at all income levels, the cuts' dollar value was highest for the investor class.
All in all, the changes constituted the centerpiece of Ronald Reagan's effort to reverse the growth trends in the federal government and install what would be called "Reaganomics" — the centerpiece of the "Reagan Revolution."
You could say Reagan's priorities were just a statement of Republican orthodoxy. To be sure, tax cuts and muscular national defense and a gimlet eye on other programs had been components of Republican platforms for generations.
Reaganomics was something else again. Like the thrusts that have come with Trump's return to office, the White House in 1981 was striving to strike while the post-election iron was still hot.
The promise of Reagan's program was that tax cuts could lessen the burden of government, unleash enterprise and so stimulate the economy as to create jobs and even increase federal revenue. The biggest advocates of the tax cuts maintained they would "pay for themselves." All gain with little or no pain. Everyone would be better off. America, writ large, would be better off.
Or, as one of Reagan's 1980 campaign slogans put it: "Let's Make America Great Again."
Another parallel between the Trump and Reagan upheavals was the presence of an unelected official suddenly wielding enormous power in a new role. In the current scenario that has been Elon Musk, the auto and space entrepreneur who helped fuel Trump's campaign late in 2024. Musk came aboard as a special adviser to Trump, running the new "Department of Government Efficiency" initiative and threatening the jobs of well over a hundred thousand federal employees.
In 1981, the designated slasher was Reagan's new director at the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman. Stockman, a former seminarian and congressman from Michigan, quickly assembled an executive budget blueprint that upended generations of assumptions about the federal government's role. At 34 years old, Stockman's youthful assurance and irreverence for sacred cows of all kinds soon upset many of his former colleagues on the Hill.
But Reagan's revolution went forward because his election coattails from 1980 had sent such a strong message to Congress. Republicans had their first majority in the Senate since the 1950s. Just as important, Reagan could look to a working coalition in the House, where Democrats had just lost 35 seats and they could not count on the votes of another 30 or more Southern Democrats whose districts had gone for Reagan. Those members' votes in the House would be enough to put his proposal over the top in their chamber.
Still, enacting as large a course correction as the new administration envisioned was a major challenge. As news of the spending cuts sank in there were protests in major cities and outside the offices of members of Congress. Reconciliation required a lot of committee action and some panels chafed at their new marching orders (called "reconciliation instructions").
As the package struggled its way through a maze of committee votes, there was a growing sense that the pushback was going to dismember the deal or defeat it outright.
But on March 30, 1981, a disturbed young man ambushed Reagan leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel and shot him at close range. Reagan took a bullet that punctured a lung and might have ended his presidency in its third month. But after emergency surgery and two weeks of hospital, Reagan was back. The drama of it all lent fresh impetus to the package as previously wavering Republicans rallied 'round.
Through it all, the drama centered on Reagan, giving him what UCLA political scientist Mark A. Peterson has called "an image of invincibility and legislative acumen" that would last for years.
But before the summer was over, the other hero of the tale would prove to be the reconciliation process that was making the legislative win possible — a process with its origins in quite a different era of relations between Congress and the president.
It was a window opened by Watergate
Reconciliation was created in the Congressional Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974. It was a product of the politics of that year, when the Vietnam War was coming to a disheartening end and President Richard Nixon was fighting a long battle against impeachment.
Nixon had been reelected in a 49-state landslide in 1972, but his second term was soon subsumed by a scandal involving his reelection campaign, spying on political opponents (including the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex) and an elaborate effort to cover it all up. Nixon's public approval, once as high as 60%, was plummeting further by the month. He would resign in August of 1974.
The 1974 act created the first Congressional Budget Office and the budget committees in both chambers of Congress, setting out a process for planning each federal fiscal year. It also included the notion of a unified, multipurpose bill that would incorporate spending and tax priorities and policy changes as well (while leaving the actual commitment of federal dollars to the traditional appropriations committees of the House and Senate).
As noted, the key element in all these rules was the elimination of the filibuster and empowerment of the Senate majority party. The original legislation limited the number of times reconciliation could be used and indicated it should be for purposes of lowering the annual budget deficit and reducing the national debt.
Although it had been available in law for Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, neither had the majorities in Congress that have been key to making reconciliation work.
Reagan was the first who did, and he used it to make his mark on his era. The effects of Reaganomics on job creation, inflation, income distribution and equity in the U.S. have been debated for more than 40 years and remain controversial today. The same could be said for the effects of other presidential uses of the reconciliation tool in the past.
How well Trump and his congressional leadership team handle that tool this year to reshape and redirect the federal government will set a powerful narrative for the first stage of Trump's second term.
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