With all the trade news and everything else coming out of the White House, you’d be forgiven if you think that Congress hasn’t been doing much lately.
That’s certainly not the case this week, when various House Committees are going to start working on the massive GOP legislative package that would extend parts of the 2017 tax law and make trillions of dollars in cuts to other programs in order to do so.
Lots of bills come up in Congress and go nowhere. But this GOP reconciliation bill is being specifically designed to pass without Democratic votes. That takes a lot of steps.
“A few months ago, the House passed kind of their blueprint for the tax and budget bill, and now they've just started actually putting some flesh on the bones for it,” said Brendan Duke with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Congress is in the process of deciding which specific policies are in and out. The top priority in this bill: tax cuts.
“So in the reconciliation bill that they're talking about doing now, Trump has his goals of a large tax cut and extending the previous tax cuts from 2017,” said Jennifer Victor, who teaches political science at George Mason University. “And that costs a lot of money. And so the reconciliation bill has to figure out how they're going to sort of offset that.”
To the tune of $4 trillion, likely more. But in the last few days, we’ve started to hear just how Republicans want to do that.
“What came out on Friday night was an outline that included extension of rates, standard deduction, alternative minimum tax, some of those really big pieces of the bill that came out in 2017,” said Max Ghenis, CEO of Policy Engine, a tech company whose software simulates the effect of economic policies.
We’re getting more details on cuts to food assistance programs and Medicaid, designed to offset the costs of those tax cuts.
Bobby Kogan with the Center for American Progress said the Medicaid cuts, in particular, are already getting a lot of pushback.
“What we see is a bill that would kick over 8 million people off their health insurance by instituting the largest Medicaid cuts in all of history,” said Kogan.
But this is still legislation in progress. And lobbyists, advocacy groups and voters will have a lot to say before a final version of the bill.
