Why Trump II legislating could look different

Reconciliation and fears of executive overreach could limit the space for bipartisan deals.

The politics of the purse are changing. Democrats may not want to roll the dice. (British Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Congress routinely struggles to address problems facing the country, but when it does legislate, it often does so on a bipartisan basis—and, as Volden and Wiseman note, work that crosses party lines is frequently achieved via omnibus legislating.

In work with Peter Hanson, I’ve investigated the process by which non-spending items get attached to the large packages that combine multiple spending measures together, often referred to as omnibus spending bills. While there’s no single reason that a standalone piece of legislation is likely to hitch a ride on a larger package, the leaders assembling the bigger bill will consider factors like whether the measure’s sponsor is politically vulnerable, whether the issue is politically urgent, and whether the individual legislation has been considered on its own, as that can be a signal that its proponents have exhausted other avenues for passage. The priorities of party leaders and key committee members also often receive favorable treatment, and if a senator threatens to hold up the entire effort over his or her individual asks, that can also lead to the inclusion of provisions. Importantly, this multi-faceted process is often bipartisan, with the underlying goal being to grow a bill’s support, not shrink it.

There are two key dynamics emerging in the early weeks of the Trump administration, however, that may limit the effectiveness of omnibus lawmaking as a tool for members of both parties to achieve their legislative goals in the year ahead. The first is the expected centrality of a particular set of legislative procedures, known as budget reconciliation, to the Republicans’ planned agenda. Reconciliation allows for certain bills—dealing with taxes and some types of federal spending—to move through the legislative process without the threat of a filibuster in the Senate. With that power, however, come limitations, in the form of Senate rules and precedents that limit the content of such bills and how long provisions in them that increase the federal deficit can last unless corresponding cuts are made elsewhere.

Early uses of the reconciliation process in the 1980s and 1990s often generated bipartisan legislation designed to achieve a shared goal of reducing the federal deficit by spreading the pain of spending cuts across a wide range of federal programs. But since the early 2000s, the procedures have been used more often to achieve party-defining agenda items, including multiple rounds of tax cuts under Republican majorities and portions of the Affordable Care Act as well as the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act under Democratic ones.

At the time of this writing, congressional Republicans are still negotiating internally over how they should make use of the reconciliation process in the 119^th Congress. But there is no expectation that Democrats will be involved in that decision-making, or in the eventual negotiations over the details of what could be a bill or set of bills that increases spending in some areas (like defense and immigration enforcement), cuts it in others (like Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and other safety-net programs), and makes significant changes to the tax code. In our current era of polarized parties and narrowly, alternating majorities, reconciliation has become a one-party exercise. If reconciliation consumes much of the legislative time and energy in 2025, there will be less bandwidth for other, bipartisan efforts.

The second dynamic characterizing the Trump administration’s early weeks is a greater threat to omnibus legislating —and, indeed, to the power of the legislative branch more generally. Under the auspices of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and working through the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies, the Trump administration has repeatedly disrupted the flow of federal funds as prescribed by Congress. OMB froze trillions of dollars of federal grants and loans appropriated by Congress. Two separate federal agencies have been subject to attempts to significantly dismantle them, despite Congress having funded their activities. Federal employees—again, whose salaries have been allocated by the legislative branch—have been laid off in large numbers.

The on-the-ground consequences of these actions are real, and hurt individuals in the United States and abroad who rely on the services and benefits federal funding makes possible. But this kind of assertion of executive power also threatens legislative authority generally and the ability to reach deals in Congress more specifically. In the United States’ separation of powers system, Congress writes the laws and the executive branch implements them. Importantly, the former occurs with the expectation that the latter will happen faithfully, in accordance with Congress’ wishes. Without a shared belief that the president will execute spending decisions in accordance with the law as Congress has written it, it becomes extremely difficult to reach an agreement on legislation—and when the measure in question is a spending bill, those challenges have spillover effects to the broader legislative process. In a world where many of the accomplishments members are able to rack up come via attaching other items to an omnibus spending bill, a breakdown of the appropriations process—in this case, because the executive branch is overreaching its authority—threatens a key avenue for legislative achievement.

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Molly Reynolds is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the author of Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the U.S. Senate.