Kevin Williamson of National Review Online explains how Congress could use the legislative maneuver known as reconciliation to limit federal government spending.

There is at the moment a movement afoot among congressional Republicans to use reconciliation in the way it is supposed to be used. Passing a budget resolution does not force the various committees with authority over specific spending items to adopt any particular policy, but including reconciliation directives in the budget can force spending cuts: A reconciliation directive can tell a committee to cut $x out of a certain spending area under its jurisdiction, and that is binding, even if it cannot force the committee to achieve those savings in any particular way. But if the committee’s members cannot agree on a way of meeting their requirements under the reconciliation directive, then legislative rules are invoked that empower the budget committee (House or Senate) to effectively make those decisions for them. It is the only real source of power that the budget committees have at their disposal, which is why being on Ways and Means is a lot more prestigious than being on the House Budget Committee.

What some congressional Republicans are considering is using reconciliation to impose $400 billion to $500 billion in spending cuts, spread out over ten years, to so-called mandatory spending. Usually, “mandatory spending” refers to the big-ticket entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, etc. But because Washington is full of crazy people, Social Security is specifically exempted from the reconciliation process, so that’s off the table. But there is a lot more than the popular retirement entitlements in mandatory spending: There’s also SNAP and TANF and other welfare programs, agriculture subsidies, federal pension and retirement-benefit programs, some grant programs, and much else. Those outlays together add up to an enormous bucket of money, but each of those programs also has a built-in constituency that makes it difficult to impose cuts. It’s the old problem of concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs: The few thousand people getting big farm-subsidy checks every year will fight a lot harder to keep them than the 300 million people funding those programs will fight to keep the few pennies a year that each of them pays in taxes to support them. While using reconciliation to impose cuts is not universally popular, there are some in Congress who would absolutely love to have reconciliation force them to do the right thing that they don’t have the huevos to do on their own initiative.