House Speaker Mike Johnson is teasing plans to pass two more significant GOP policy bills, over the next year in the same way Congress squeezed out the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Louisiana GOPer — speaking hours after wrangling President Trump’s marquee bill through Congress — said Republicans intend to take advantage of their remaining reconciliation bills: special budget-related measures that can bypass a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
“The reconciliation bill today was a big, giant leap forward. But we’re going to do this again. We’re gonna have a second reconciliation package in the fall and a third in the spring of next year,” Johnson said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday — without going into specifics.
Although the speaker didn’t disclose details, the next two reconciliation bills are likely to revolve around additional tax priorities, as well as spending cuts that Republicans are after but weren’t able to get done in the megabill. The reconciliation bills might also include technical fixes to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
While reconciliation bills allow Republicans to circumvent Democrats in the Senate, there are significant limitations on what they can do. They can only contain measures that relate to the budget and can’t increase the deficit over a 10-year window. Additionally, reconciliation bills are largely limited to impacting mandatory programs like Medicaid, but they can’t affect Social Security.
“I bet there will be another reconciliation package. I don’t think it’ll be as big. I think there’ll be some targeted stuff,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told The Post this week. “But I think there’s a good chance of that.”
During the roughly 29-hour slog to pass the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, GOP leadership had privately assured some of the holdouts that there would likely be additional reconciliation bills in the future.
But many Republicans were left with the impression that future reconciliation bills will be much smaller in scale and lower stakes than what they barely managed to finagle through Congress this week.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.) suggested there was “likely to be a second and third reconciliation bill that would not be as significant” as the bill that passed Thursday. “Obviously, we may have to clean up some matters.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which the presidennt signed into law Friday — is an 870-page piece of legislation that lays out Trump’s signature legislative agenda, including an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, reduced taxes on tips and overtime pay, increased domestic energy production, bolstered border security, ramped-up defense spending and spending cuts.
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who voted against the initial House version of the megabill in May, claimed that he flipped to vote in favor of it partly due to the promise of a future reconciliation bill.
Over recent years, Republicans and Democrats have leaned on reconciliation to pass partisan legislation that doesn’t require votes from the other party to reach the 60-vote threshold to break a Senate filibuster.
During Trump’s first term, Republicans used reconciliation to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Under President Joe Biden, Democrats used it for the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Johnson has publicly speculated that Republicans were crushed in the 2018 midterm elections because they passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 too late for voters to reap the benefits.
It cleared Congress in December 2018.
That’s a big factor in why he pushed to get Trump’s signature megabill across the finish line by this Fourth of July.
“We basically enacted in this agenda what we did in the first two years of the [first] Trump administration, but this time, we did it on steroids,” Johnson said. “We added all sorts of other policies to really fuel the US economy.
“Everyone will be experiencing that before the midterms.”
Additionally, Johnson teased plans to pursue rescission packages, in which Congress cancels previously authorized spending and to have a tighter appropriations process in order to cut down on the ballooning deficit.
“We’re going to have rescission packages. The White House is sending us collections of items to claw back the spending that was wasted,” he said. “And we’re going to appropriate at lower levels.”
Republicans will face a government shutdown fight next
But the next real political headache Johnson is staring down isn’t the future reconciliation bills. It’s the partial government shutdown that’s looming in the fall.
Every fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, Congress has to fund the federal government through the appropriations process, or its lights go out.
Unlike reconciliation, appropriation bills to fund the government need to overcome a 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster in the Senate. Republicans only have a 53-seat majority, which means they’ll need to get Democrats on board.
Fiscal hawks on the Republican side have been keen on maximizing spending cuts, putting leadership in a jam between its hardliners and the need to negotiate with Democrats.
Right now, government funding is effectively running on autopilot after Congress barely passed a spending patch in March to avert a partial shutdown.
