Congress is debating its second reconciliation bill in less than a year—and is already talking about a third. What was supposed to be a narrow budgetary tool has become something else entirely. Reconciliation is now a fast track for major spending with few constraints and even fewer tradeoffs. A tool intended to help the nation’s fiscal health, is turning into one that harms it.

The latest step came on April 23, when the Senate approved a budget resolution to advance what’s being called “Reconciliation 2.0.” The bill would steer up to $140 billion total—in mandatory spending to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection. Republican leadership hopes it will clear the House without changes, though opposition within the conference has slowed progress. In the short term, passage would partially address funding for those agencies, while the rest of the Department of Homeland Security still awaits a full-year bill.

Reconciliation was created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 as a mechanism to ensure that tax laws and mandatory spending programs could be revised to conform with deficit-reduction targets set in the annual budget resolution. But the process has drifted far from that original purpose. Beginning with the Bush-era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, congressional majorities in both parties started using reconciliation to increase deficits rather than reduce them, exploiting the law’s statutory ambiguity to pass major tax-cutting and spending legislation on a simple majority vote.

In 2017, reconciliation carried the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which was originally projected to add roughly $1.5 trillion to the debt over a decade. The Democrats tapped reconciliation in 2022 to enact the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act, but at least when the dust settled on that law it was expected to reduce deficits. Last year, it carried the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended and expanded those TCJA tax cuts—along with new ones—at a direct cost of roughly $3.4 trillion over ten years, and more than $4 trillion when interest costs are included. (The bill did include roughly $1.4 trillion in spending cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP and major new spending at the Pentagon and DHS, but the above estimates already account for those provisions.) Now reconciliation is being used again to move tens of billions in new spending with no offsets at all.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA) was supposed to reset this trajectory. It capped discretionary spending, enforced tradeoffs between defense and non-defense priorities, and was projected to reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over a decade. It wasn’t perfect, but it reflected a rare bipartisan acknowledgment that borrowing was on an unsustainable path. The FRA caps expired after fiscal year 2025 and were never renewed. By then, Congress had already found ways around them, like using emergency spending and shifting some spending into reconciliation—a new maneuver—to avoid the limits altogether.

Budget scoring has also been bent to accommodate extending tax cuts without fully recognizing their cost. For instance, when projecting potential costs of the TCJA, budget analysts followed the letter of the law and assumed that the bill’s tax cuts, most of which Congress authorized for only five to seven years, would in fact expire and revenue would increase in later years. OBBBA turned that on its head by rejecting this historically agreed upon use of current law baseline. Instead, Republicans used a current policy baseline that treats expiring provisions as though they were going to continue, making their extension appear nearly “free.”

Reconciliation 2.0 will spend up to $140 billion without offsets, but the circus may not end there. The administration is requesting $350 billion in additional Pentagon spending through reconciliation—on top of a base budget request of approximately $1.15 trillion. That base request alone represents a roughly $250 billion increase over last year’s discretionary Pentagon budget. If lawmakers go along with that, piling on another $350 billion would bring the total national security topline to $1.5 trillion, the largest single-year military budget ever, including during World War II, even after adjusting for inflation. That reconciliation funding would cover everything from weapons procurement to missile defense systems, with major investments effectively shifted out of the regular appropriations process and shielded from the oversight that comes with it.

Once a party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, policymakers quickly turn to reconciliation to throw off the constraints of regular order, avoid the filibuster, and jam through partisan legislation by a simple majority. Of course, defending “regular order” hasn’t been perfect. The Congressional Budget Act turns 52 this year, and in that time, Congress has managed to pass all its appropriations bills on time exactly four times—the last being 1997. In 13 of the past 15 fiscal years, lawmakers have not passed a single spending bill by the October 1^st start of the fiscal year. The rest of the time, the federal government has lurched from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, funding the government at the previous year’s levels for months at a time, or stumbling into shutdowns when even that minimal task proved too politically difficult. Budget resolutions—the foundational document the entire process is built around—routinely go unadopted, unless they are needed to unlock reconciliation.

So, the answer isn’t simply to send spending back through regular order and call it a day. Regular order, on its own, has proven no match for the political incentives that drive deficit spending. The real problem is that Congress has spent decades dismantling every constraint the budget process ever had—the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings targets, the PAYGO rules, the BCA caps, the FRA limits—one by one, whenever those constraints became inconvenient. Reconciliation abuse is the latest chapter in this story.

What taxpayers actually need is for Congress to treat the budget process as something worth fixing rather than gaming. That means reinstating enforceable deficit targets with real teeth, restoring PAYGO or a meaningful equivalent, and—if reconciliation is going to remain a feature of the legislative landscape—requiring that it cannot increase deficits and establishing clear rules about what it can and cannot be used for. The 1974 law provided a framework, but Congress has spent fifty years finding workarounds. At some point, the question isn’t whether the framework needs defending. It’s whether Congress has any interest in governing its own finances at all—or whether the whole enterprise has simply become a performance in need of greater reform.