Last week the House Budget Committee moved on a budget or “deeming” resolution that will allow the House to proceed on their twelve appropriations bills. It is not a joint budget resolution that would require adoption by the Senate and would establish a reconciliation procedure. That action will likely wait for later this summer.
The House Appropriations subcommittees and full committee have set dates for the “mark-up” of the 12 appropriations for mid-July, but the Senate is much further behind. The House will mark-up a Labor-HHS-Education bill on July 12 and July 15 in the Committee. Due to the lateness of the budget, the work on the March pandemic relief, and the delayed strategy around a reconciliation, this likely means that there will need to be a continuing resolution to start the FY 2022 fiscal year on October 1, 2021.
A decision on reconciliation has not been made as a bipartisan group of senators continues pursuing an infrastructure bill. A group of five Democrats and five Republicans have outlined an infrastructure bill that is less than what the President has outlined. One scenario is that there would be a narrower infrastructure bill passed in a regular legislative order with the votes of both Democrats and Republicans. Under this strategy, this would satisfy the requirements of some Democratic senators on bipartisanship, and they would join in on a reconciliation bill that would include much of President Biden’s American Families Plan along with parts of the infrastructure package that was left out of the bipartisan deal.
The other scenario is that the Republicans cannot provide enough votes for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Senate Democrats would attempt to put everything in a late fall early winter reconciliation adopted with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Harris.
