Senate Budget Resolution Falls Short

The Senate Budget Committee released a Fiscal Year 2026 budget resolution today that is expected to receive a vote in the full Senate soon. The resolution includes reconciliation instructions allowing for up to $70 billion of deficit increases each for the Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, with a claimed target of $70 billion in total spending. This money would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and partially fund Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for roughly 3.5 years, in lieu of ordinary discretionary appropriations.

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

The budget process is already badly broken, and this resolution would make it worse by using reconciliation to sidestep the regular appropriations process and put even more spending on autopilot.

To make matters worse, this budget resolution allows twice as much spending as they say they need by allowing two different committees to each spend $70 billion, and it doesn’t require any offsets to finance the costs – in fact it waives the Senate PAYGO rules.

Lawmakers should be putting forward a real plan to govern and a real plan to improve the nation’s finances. That means enacting and enforcing reasonable discretionary caps, securing the trust funds, slowing spending growth, and raising adequate revenue. Instead, this resolution would facilitate new mandatory spending while leaving discretionary spending uncapped and unresolved.

At a minimum, Congress should put a $70 billion overall cap on deficit increases under the budget resolution – and they need to make sure the reconciliation bill allocates new funding in the years it is intended to be spent, rather than creating a new slush fund.

Ultimately, budget resolutions should be used to put the country on a more responsible fiscal path, not to bless more borrowing and more budget gimmicks. Our country is deep in debt – reconciliation should be for deficit reduction.

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