Reconciliation Should Be for Deficit Reduction

The Senate may soon vote on a reconciliation bill that would appropriate $70 billion for various immigration and Homeland Security agencies in place of ordinary appropriations. Although funding is intended to cover 3.5 years’ worth of funding, the bill appropriates all the funds in Fiscal Year 2026 and includes no guardrails to prevent funding from being spent more quickly than intended. Lawmakers have also not put in place any mechanism to prevent additional regular appropriations on top of this mandatory funding.  

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:  

Debt has surpassed the size of the economy, inflation is rising, and interest costs are exploding. Yet instead of using the reconciliation process for deficit reduction, Congress is using it to further break the budget process and establish a new multi-year slush fund due to the lack of guardrails on when money is to be spent.  

Congress should have funded immigration enforcement through regular order on the discretionary side of the budget. Instead, policymakers are taking the novel and unprecedented approach of funding ordinary functions of government through mandatory funding under reconciliation. If they pursue this unusual path, they should at the very least limit funding to specific needs, restrict spending to the year it is intended, and offset any costs.  

Given our dire fiscal situation and the large amount of immigration enforcement funding in the previous reconciliation bill, Congress should not be establishing a $70 billion deficit-financed slush fund.  

Our historic debt levels call for us to return to some semblance of fiscal sanity, which starts with passing an actual budget resolution to establish a meaningful fiscal goal such as 3% of GDP deficits and facilitating a realistic plan to get there. Instead, Congress is using the budget to circumvent the budget process and increase spending further. 

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.