Legislative Process for H.R. 1
In the contemporary Congress, when one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, it nevertheless needs to overcome the Senate minority’s filibuster. It can do that by getting 60 senators to vote for cloture, or it can use one of several procedural shortcuts that allows legislation to pass with a simple majority. Budget Reconciliation has been the most important of these, and it became the preferred vehicle for most of Republicans’ legislative ambitions in 2025. Development of this law, popularly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, proceeded through several stages, described here in short and in greater detail below.
What is Budget Reconciliation, and why was it so central to Republicans’ 2025 strategy?
In the 2024 election, Republicans won the legislative “trifecta”—they controlled the House, Senate, and White House. With this unified control of government, they set their sights on a budget reconciliation bill to advance numerous aspects of their agenda.
When legislators created the budget reconciliation process as part of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, they intended it to help the House and Senate reconcile their various fiscal plans in service of balancing the budget. Crucially, a reconciliation act that fulfills the instructions in a budget resolution is privileged in the Senate—meaning it cannot be filibustered. Because of this procedural advantage, in recent years many of the most ambitious bills passed on a partisan basis have taken the form of budget reconciliation acts.
By law, the budget reconciliation process must ordinarily progress through certain steps. First, the House and Senate must pass budget resolutions, which contain specific goals for spending or revenue that are conveyed to House and Senate committees through “instructions.” Next, the instructed committees deliberate and then report out recommendations in compliance with those instructions. Each chamber’s Budget Committee then combines the work of the instructed committees into a single bill, without substantive amendment; at this point, the budget reconciliation bill is ready for consideration by the full chamber—crucially, under expedited procedures mandated by the 1974 Act. The Act imposes various limitations on what can be included in the bill, but it also makes it unnecessary to invoke cloture in the Senate. This ability to avoid a filibuster has made reconciliation the preferred tool for ambitious fiscal legislation backed by one party that controls the House, Senate, and White House in recent years. Although reconciliation was originally supposed to be a tool for reducing the federal budget deficit, in recent years reconciliation laws have often expanded the deficit.
When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was largely uninterested in working with congressional Democrats. Since Senate Republicans did not wish to do away with the legislative filibuster, budget reconciliation stood out as the most attractive path to legislative success. Even before Trump’s inauguration, there was an active intra-GOP debate over whether to pursue one reconciliation bill or two (with one devoted entirely to issues of border security); Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson favored the strategy of “one big beautiful bill,” surely in large part because Republican legislators would have a hard time voting “No” on such a package. Johnson and other House leaders pursued this strategy, although it was quite unclear whether it would succeed, given the razor-thin majority that Republicans had in the House.
House Budget Resolution
The House Budget Committee publicly released its resolution (H.Con.Res. 14) on February 12, 2025 and formally reported the measure on February 18.
On February 25, 2025, the House voted on a resolution (rule) from the House Rules Committee providing for consideration of that resolution. It was agreed to, 217-211, on a straight party-line vote.
As part of that rule, a new version of the resolution’s text was substituted for that originally reported by the Budget Committee. (Such substitutions at the Rules Committee stage are not unusual.) Pursuant to the rule, the House debated the amended measure for three hours (while resolved into the Committee of the Whole). That evening, the House took a final vote on the resolution. At that time, the House had 433 members, with Republicans controlling 218 seats and Democrats 215; consequently, if all Democrats opposed a measure (as they typically do for agenda-setting measures), Republicans could only afford one defection. After significant whipping by House GOP leadership, the resolution was agreed to 217-215, with Rep. Thomas Massie casting the lone GOP vote against.
Senate’s Consideration of Budget Resolutions
The Senate’s budget process for 2025 began before the House’s. On February 13, Senator Lindsey Graham, the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, reported a resolution (S.Con.Res. 7) to the Senate without a committee report. The full Senate debated the measure on February 20 and 21, including considering 25 amendments, just two of which were agreed to. The amended resolution was agreed to, 52-48. Because the House-passed budget resolution differed quite significantly from this initial Senate version, the Senate decided to turn to the House’s version, calling it up for debate on April 3 and then taking up an amendment in the nature of a substitute offered by Graham. Over the two days, senators considered many amendments, voting down all of them except one from Sen. Dan Sullivan allowing for the creation of a deficit-neutral trust fund to protect Medicaid. On April 5, the Senate voted to agree to the amended resolution, 51-48, with all Republicans voting in favor except Sens. Susan Collins and Rand Paul.
Although many House members felt that the Senate’s budget resolution was insufficiently ambitious in cutting spending, House Republican leaders were nevertheless eager to get the House to quickly agree to the Senate’s amended version. They teed it up for quick consideration with a closed rule allowing for just two hours of debate and no amendments, which the House passed, 216-215, on the afternoon of April 9. But leaders then postponed the vote on final agreement when it appeared it would fail. After winning over skeptics that night, the House agreed to the Senate’s version of the budget resolution the next morning, 216-214. That allowed both chambers to proceed to the substantive work of putting together their reconciliation packages.
House Debate and Initial Passage of H.R. 1
House committees worked quickly in fulfilling the budget resolution’s instructions. On May 16, the House Budget Committee sought to report the compiled bill but failed to do so, 16-21, when several Republicans voted with Democrats against proceeding. They were mollified over the following weekend and on May 19, the Budget Committee voted, 17-16, to report the bill (H.R. 1). This is the version that appears as RH in the tracker.(Note: some provisions of the bill were previously introduced as standalone legislation; where Congress.gov has tracked these connections through its “Related Bills” section, we include this information and allow for comparison with the original version in the tracker. There are undoubtedly many other such connections not officially flagged that we have not traced, however.)
Late at night on May 21, a Rules Committee substitute was teed up for consideration, with just two hours of debate, by a closed rule, which survived several points of order and was narrowly agreed to, 217-212. In the early morning of May 22, the House voted to pass the amended version of H.R. 1, which at this point formally bore the short title, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The vote was 215-214-1, with all Republicans voting in favor except Reps. Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson, each of whom voted no, and Rep. Andy Harris, who voted present. (Two other Republicans inadvertently missed the vote.) This is the version that appears as PH in the tracker.
Senate Debate and Passage of H.R. 1
It would be another month before the Senate formally took up the bill, during which time Senate committees worked to create their own version of the legislation, often quite different from the House’s. On June 28, 2025, the Senate moved to proceed to consideration of H.R. 1 as modified by S.Amdt. 2360 proposed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune on behalf of Senator Graham. This amendment in the nature of a substitute represented the compilation of the Senate committees’ work, even though the Senate Budget Committee did not formally report its own bill. This is the version that appears as S.Amdt in the tracker. On June 29, the Senate proceeded with several consecutive days of debate, during which many amendments to S.Amdt. 2360 were debated and several adopted. Among these was S.Amdt. 2848, a full rewrite once again offered by Senator Graham, and agreed to 50-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie (and three Republican senators voting no: Collins, Paul, and Tillis). Senators voted twice more, with identical results, agreeing to adoption of S.Amdt. 2360 (as amended) and then finally passing the amended bill on July 1.
Throughout this process, Democratic senators raised two fundamental objections to the process, each of which is rooted in the 1974 Budget Act.
First, they challenged whether many provisions were consistent with the Byrd Rule (section 313 of the Congressional Budget Act, codified at 2 U.S.C. § 644). The Byrd Rule’s extraneousness test requires that provisions must be sufficiently budget-centric—that is, if a provision is a policy change with only incidental fiscal effects, then it is not allowed in a budget reconciliation law, although in practice defining the relevant standard is difficult and controversial. In most cases, provisions challenged were brought before the Senate’s parliamentarian for her advice; if she advised that Byrd Rule points of order should be sustained, the offending language would be reworked or removed before being formally introduced for the Senate’s consideration. Unfortunately, the tracker does not currently make it easy to track such alterations; some “Disappeared Sections” were likely not included in the Senate versions because of Byrd Rule issues, but this is not the only reason a provision may have been dropped. Only one provision was ultimately stricken on the floor because of an extraneousness point of order: the short title provision. Accordingly, in the Senate’s final version, the law is no longer officially called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Rather, it has only its formal title: “An Act, to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14.”
Second, Democrats challenged whether Republicans reconciliation law actually complied with the dollar requirements specified in the budget resolution. To simplify, they accused Republicans of manipulating the accounting (by using a “current policy” baseline instead of a “current law” baseline) in an impermissible way. When these challenges were brought forth as points of order on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Thune said these matters had been settled by the Senate Budget Committee and he therefore ruled against the points of order; his ruling was sustained on party line votes.
Final Passage of Senate Version in the House
Many House Republicans found the Senate’s changes objectionable, and some immediately demanded that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson find a way to restore aspects of the House version. Johnson, House GOP leaders, and the White House all believed that reopening the bill would be risky, given how narrowly it had secured passage in the Senate. (In particular, they worried they might lose the vote of Senator Lisa Murkowski.) They therefore brought up the Senate’s amended version of H.R. 1 for consideration under a closed rule on July 3 that provided for only one hour of debate. By convention, though, the House Minority Leader was given a “magic minute” of unlimited duration, and so Rep. Hakeem Jeffries spoke for more than eight hours against the bill, setting the record for the longest known speech in U.S. House history. Once debate concluded, the House voted to pass the Senate-amended version, 218-214. All Republicans voted for passage except Reps. Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick. This is the version that appears as Enrolled in the tracker.
President Trump signed the bill into law on July 4, 2025. In September 2025, Republicans began referring to the law as the “Working Families Tax Cuts Act,” although this name has no basis in the statute itself.