After weeks of waiting for the House to make the first move on budget reconciliation, Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced on February 5 that his Committee will mark up the Senate’s fiscal year 2025 budget resolution the week of February 10, angering House leaders who’ve been working to move theirs first.
Regardless of the originating chamber, the fiscal year 2025 budget resolution will include budget reconciliation instructions to certain committees to spend or save federal funding over the next 10 years. The instructions to committees will include a single deadline by which committees will respond to the Budget Committee with their respective recommendations for federal spending or saving. These recommendations are then pulled together into an omnibus reconciliation act for enactment. The House is working on its plans for creating a budget resolution with reconciliation instructions, which it says could be voted on by the House Budget Committee by February 7.
The week of February 3, conservative House Republicans demanded that $1 trillion in cuts be achieved through reconciliation, much more than House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) initial budget plan to cut $300 billion, causing a delay of the House Budget Committee’s consideration of its budget resolution and accompanying reconciliation instructions to committees to identify those cuts. By February 5, fiscally conservative House members said negotiations to increase reconciliation instructions’ spending cuts were promising, leaving open the possibility that the House could move a budget resolution the week of February 3.
Timing is not the only chaffing point between the House and Senate. The House, with only a 217-215 Republican majority, hopes to only have to pass one budget reconciliation act that includes all of President Trump’s priorities, including border security funding, tax cut extensions, and funding to expand domestic energy production. The Senate is looking at a two-bill process, with the first reconciliation act including funding for border security and increased defense spending and the second including the remaining pieces.
How the House and Senate bills are paid for, and how much they decrease the federal deficit after they pay for their funding increases, is of great concern to LeadingAge as they work to protect Medicaid from deep cuts in funding and access and preserve the tax exemption of municipal bonds. While budget reconciliation poses significant threats to aging services resources, there are also opportunities, including the repeal of the CMS nursing home staffing mandate and increasing low-income housing tax credits.
The committees that receive reconciliation instructions to cut certain amounts (or at least certain amounts) have begun considering their options. The time for aging services stakeholders to engage with their House and Senate members is now. On February 5, LeadingAge issued its latest action alert to tell Congress what to include (repeal of the nursing home staffing mandate); what to reject (cuts to Medicaid); what to preserve (tax-exempt municipal bonds), and what to increase (the Low Income Housing Tax Credit). Access the action alert here.