Starting Up the Reconciliation Machine

This week the Senate began the long, procedure-heavy process of creating and passing a reconciliation bill in order to enact Republican priorities without requiring any votes from Democratic legislators: funding the parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whose funding remains lapsed and additional funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Also this week, the House agreed to two bills that next go to the President and voted on a number of bills related to rural areas.

Two New Laws Soon

Both of these bills go to the President next for signing:

• S. 98: Rural Broadband Protection Act of 2025 passed the House by voice vote.
• S. 1020: A bill to require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to extend the time period during which licensees are required to commence construction of certain hydropower projects, passed the House 394-14.

House Votes on Rural-related Bills

These bills will go the Senate next. They are not close to becoming law.

• H.R. 2493: Improving Care in Rural America Reauthorization Act of 2025 passed 406-4.
• H.R. 5201: Kari’s Law Reporting Act passed 405-5. According to the FCC, “Kari’s Law requires direct 911 dialing and notification capabilities in multi-line telephone systems (MLTS), which are typically found in enterprises such as office buildings, campuses, and hotels.” This bill would require a report on how the implementation of Kari’s Law is going.
• H.R. 5200: Emergency Reporting Act, which would result in reports after activation of the Disaster Information Reporting System and to make improvements to network outage reporting, passed 386-7.
• H.R. 1681: Expediting Federal Broadband Deployment Reviews Act, which would establish an interagency group to ensure that certain Federal land management agencies prioritize the review of requests for communications use authorizations, passed 384-9.
• H.R. 5587: HEATS Act, which would amend the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970 to waive the requirement for a Federal drilling permit for certain activities and exempt certain activities from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, passed 231-186.
• H.R. 6387: FIRE Act passed 220-198. Per the site Legis1, “The FIRE Act addresses a long-standing tension between federal air quality enforcement and state-level wildfire prevention. Under the current law, states risk falling out of compliance with national air quality standards when they conduct prescribed burns, even though those controlled burns are designed to reduce the far more damaging emissions from uncontrolled wildfires. The bill amends Section 319(b) of the Clean Air Act to give states a clearer path to exclude wildfire mitigation activities from air quality compliance calculations.” As you can see from the vote totals, this bill has strong partisan divergence. Why? As Legis1 went on to say, it’s an open question “…whether the bill is a practical fix for wildfire-prone states or a backdoor weakening of air quality standards…”. Which way a member of Congress sees it is almost entirely determined by which party the legislator belongs to.
• H.R. 4690: Reliable Federal Infrastructure Act, which would amend the Energy Conservation and Production Act to repeal certain Federal building energy efficiency performance standards, passed 215-202.

Funding the Department of Homeland Security by Reconciliation

The Department of Homeland Security is, sort of, in a shutdown. When appropriated funds for fiscal year 2026 lapsed early this year because Congress did not reach an agreement on funding it, DHS agencies without multi-year funds including TSA and the cybersecurity agency CISA stopped paying its employees. (ICE and CBP, on the other hand, had more-than-sufficient multi-year funds from last year’s reconciliation bill, and did not shut down.) Then they re-opened — the Trump Administration dubiously reassigned money appropriated to other purposes (more on that next week) — but that money isn’t expected to carry the department through September, the end of the fiscal year.

Last year’s reconciliation bill provided four years worth of funding for DHS. But now at least one Republican is telling Migrant Insider that DHS is running out of all that money because they’ve repurposed it to pay staff during the shutdown. As Migrant Insider goes on to note in this post, it’s hard to know if these claims are true because DHS has stopped reporting how it’s spending its money.

Republicans want to use the reconciliation process to fund DHS, and potentially other policy changes, without any Democratic votes.

The budget reconciliation process is complicated. Step 1 is having either chamber of Congress come up with a “budget resolution”. The budget resolution sets the amount of money that relevant committees will have to allocate in the reconciliation bill itself. As noted by reporter Jennifer Shutt, it’s just a blueprint and nothing in it, even if both chambers agree to it, changes existing law or funding amounts.

The Senate passed its budget resolution on Tuesday, April 21, in a party-line vote of 52-46. The resolution now goes to the House. Just like any other piece of legislation, the House could amend it and if they did, it would bounce back to the Senate.

Legislator Use of AI

NOTUS published an interesting piece describing how some members of Congress are using AI, both personally and professionally. So far, as far as we’re aware, AI is not being used to draft legislation, but from the kinds of uses described in the article, you could see how legislators might want to go that way some day.

Something that caught our eye was a mention that Sen. Schiff (D-CA) used an AI tool to draft a living will. Given all the stories in the news about lawyers submitting legal documents with made up cases in them to courts (like this one), Schiff’s choice might be surprising.

But, in general, when the user has expertise in an area, some of the AI tools out there can be helpful. Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote about how he uses AI tools to do his work and argues that, when the user has a specific task and enough expertise to assess the tool’s output, it can be helpful.

Now, Sen. Schiff is a former prosecutor. Does this make him expert enough in trusts to assess the quality of the draft he was given? We don’t know - your GovTracker is not a lawyer of any kind. But we do know that many professions have enough specialization that expertise in one area would not automatically confer expertise in another.

So while GovTrack doesn’t care about Sen. Schiff’s personal trust arrangements (unless it somehow turned out the trust was a vehicle to violate House Ethics rules), we do care about legislators becoming reliant on AI tools if they don’t have the relevant expertise to assess how well the tools are performing or demonstrated awareness of their own limitations.

Starting Up the Reconciliation Machine was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.