The House Budget Committee has approved a budget outline that would require substantial cuts to numerous government programs, including most likely federal employee retirement and health insurance benefits.
The budget “resolution” now moves to floor voting in the House, where it would take virtual unanimity among Republicans to pass—which has not been the case in the recent past years—and then approval by the Senate.
Should it clear those hurdles, it would trigger a process called reconciliation, in which individual committees would make recommendations to increase income or decrease spending in areas under their purview. Those would then be combined into one bill that would require only a simple majority vote in the Senate, not subject to the 60-vote majority most commonly required there for major budget and other legislation.
