Washington, D.C. — “This budget resolution gives reconciliation instructions to the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees in both chambers, each capped at $70 billion, to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Using the reconciliation process to fast-track this level of spending, with minimal deliberation and no requirement to offset the cost, is exactly the kind of fiscal recklessness that taxpayers should reject.

“Let’s take a step back. We have one party in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Under normal circumstances, that kind of unified government is supposed to make governing easier — a mandate to move legislation through regular order, build majorities, hold hearings, and let the process work. Instead, we are watching a new chapter of dysfunction unfold in real time, one defined by a reliance on budget reconciliation to do the work that Congress should be doing through the front door.

“This is not the first reconciliation package from this Congress. The last one — the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill — is projected to add more than $4 trillion to the national debt over a decade. That bill extended and expanded the 2017 tax cuts with no serious attempt to offset the lost revenue, and added $170 billion in border and immigration enforcement spending. Now comes another reconciliation package that could add tens of billions more — and there is already talk of a third. We are not seeing an occasional use of an emergency legislative tool — we are witnessing the systematic replacement of the congressional budget process itself.

“Reconciliation was created as a narrow mechanism to reduce deficits. It was never designed to be a catch-all policy vehicle, and it was certainly never meant to be a spending tool and substitute for the appropriations process or the normal give-and-take of actually legislating. At some point, the question isn’t just whether these specific policies are good or bad for taxpayers. The question is whether Congress is still functioning as a deliberative body at all — or whether it has simply become a rubber stamp for whoever controls the majority at a given moment.”

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