The purpose of the reconciliation process is to enhance Congress's ability to bring existing spending, revenue, and debt limit laws into compliance with current fiscal priorities established in the annual budget resolution. When Congress adopts a budget resolution, it is agreeing upon budgetary goals for the upcoming fiscal year. In some cases, for these goals to be achieved, Congress must pass legislation that alters current revenue, direct spending, or debt limit laws. In this situation Congress seeks to reconcile existing law with its current priorities. The reconciliation process is still a relatively new congressional process in that there have been only 24 reconciliation bills passed by Congress since the first use of reconciliation in 1980. Budget reconciliation is an optional congressional process that consists of several different stages ( Figure 1 ). The first stage is the adoption of the budget resolution. If Congress intends to use the reconciliation process, reconciliation directives (also referred to as reconciliation instructions) must be included in the annual budget resolution. These directives trigger the second stage of the process by instructing individual committees to develop and report legislation that would change laws within their respective jurisdictions related to spending, revenue, or the debt limit. These directives detail which committee(s) should report reconciliation legislation, the date by which the committee(s) should report, the dollar amount of budgetary change to be achieved in the reconciliation legislation, and the time period over which the impact of the budgetary change should be measured. If a single committee is directed in the budget resolution to develop reconciliation legislation, it will likely be instructed to report this language directly to its full chamber. If, however, several committees are directed to report reconciliation legislation, they will typically be directed to submit the language to their respective Budget Committees for packaging, without any substantive change, into an omnibus measure. During the second stage of the reconciliation process, the specified committee develops legislation in response to the reconciliation directive included in the budget resolution. The committee will then meet to vote whether to report that language. The committee may vote to report the language favorably or unfavorably, the latter meaning that although it satisfied its directive, the committee did not support the language. As stated above, if more than one committee has been directed to report reconciliation legislation, they are directed to submit such language to their respective Budget Committees. Each Budget Committee then packages all committee responses into an omnibus budget reconciliation bill without making any substantive revisions and votes on whether to report the omnibus reconciliation bill to the full chamber. In this way, both the legislative committees and the Budget Committees in both chambers have important roles to play in using the reconciliation process. During the final stages of the reconciliation process, the reported legislation is considered under expedited procedures in both the House and Senate. As with all legislation, any differences in the reconciliation legislation as passed by the two chambers must be resolved before the bill can be sent to the President for the final stage of the process: either approval or veto. Sometimes the reconciliation process triggered in the annual budget resolution of a specific year is not completed until the subsequent year. For instance, the FY2006 budget resolution, agreed to on April 28, 2005, included reconciliation directives that resulted in the enactment of two reconciliation bills, but these bills were not signed into law until February and May of 2006. As described above, Congress has the option of including reconciliation directives in its annual budget resolution. These directives trigger the reconciliation process, and without their inclusion in a budget resolution, no measure would be eligible to be considered under expedited reconciliation procedures. When reconciliation directives are included in an annual budget resolution, their purpose is to require committees to develop and report legislation that will allow Congress to achieve the budgetary goals set forth in the annual budget resolution. These directives detail which committee(s) should report reconciliation legislation, the date by which the committee(s) should report, the dollar amount of budgetary change that should exist within the reconciliation legislation, and the time period over which the budgetary change should occur. They might also include language regarding the type of budgetary change that should be reported (revenue, spending, or debt limit legislation), as well as other procedural provisions, contingencies, and programmatic direction. In this way, the reconciliation process allows the Budget Committees to assist Congress in implementing the budgetary changes outlined in the budget resolution while, at the same time, protecting legislative committee jurisdiction over direct spending and revenue laws by allowing them to report legislative changes of their choice. As described above, reconciliation directives in a budget resolution direct a specific committee or committees to develop legislation achieving a desired budgetary outcome. In both the House and Senate, reconciliation instructions in a budget resolution have directed either a single committee to report or multiple committees to report. In cases when only one committee has been directed to report, the process directs the committee to report its reconciliation legislation directly to its full chamber. If the budget resolution instructs more than one committee to report reconciliation legislation, then those committees are directed to submit their legislative recommendations to their respective Budget Committees. Each Budget Committee then packages the committee responses into an omnibus budget reconciliation bill without making any substantive revisions and votes on whether to report the omnibus reconciliation bill. Any legislative committee with jurisdiction over spending, revenues, or the debt limit may be directed to report reconciliation legislation, and many have been instructed to report reconciliation legislation at some point. Because the Senate Finance Committee and the House Committee on Ways and Means each have jurisdiction within their respective chambers over all revenue and debt limit legislation—as well as some direct spending legislation—these committees are often directed to report some type of reconciliation legislation when reconciliation directives are included in a budget resolution. Since 1989, 14 budget resolutions have included reconciliation directives to Senate committees. Thirteen of those 14 directed the Senate Finance Committee to report reconciliation legislation. Similarly, since 1989, 14 budget resolutions have included reconciliation directives to House committees. Thirteen of those 14 directed the House Ways and Means Committee to report reconciliation legislation. In current practice, reconciliation may include direct spending legislation but does not include discretionary spending provisions. Discretionary spending is subject to other enforcement mechanisms. The Appropriations Committees have been directed to report reconciliation legislation on only two occasions and have not been directed to do so since 1981. Individual committees are sometimes given several separate reconciliation directives within a single budget resolution. In 2000, for instance, the budget resolution included four separate reconciliation instructions to the House Ways and Means Committee. There are several reasons why a budget resolution may include multiple directives to a single committee. First, a committee may be directed to report more than one kind of reconciliation legislation with a separate directive given for each type. Section 310 of the Budget Act recognizes three types of reconciliation legislation that committees may be directed to report: spending, revenue, and debt limit. The Budget Act also recognizes that committees may be directed to report a combination of spending and revenue legislation, including a direction to achieve deficit-neutral reductions. If a committee is given more than one directive—for instance, to increase revenues and decrease spending—then the committee may respond with separate pieces of legislation. Under current practice in the Senate, however, this provision has been interpreted to mean that no more than one reconciliation measure of each type is permitted. Reconciliation instructions, therefore, may result in the creation of no more than three reconciliation bills that may be considered on the floor under expedited procedures—and only if they are divided so that there is one for spending, one for revenue, and one for the debt limit. A committee may also be asked to report reconciliation legislation that achieves budgetary goals over different periods of time. Lastly, reconciliation directives may be separated to make clear that the directives are intended to achieve separate policy goals. Reconciliation directives included in an annual budget resolution direct a committee to report (or submit to the Budget Committee) legislation by a specific date. For example: (b) Not later than June 20, 1980, each committee specified in subsection (a) shall submit its recommendations to the Committee on the Budget of its House. (1) Not later than July 23, 1999, the Senate Committee on Finance shall report to the Senate a reconciliation bill. As can be seen in Table 1 , these due dates may vary in several respects. In some years, they have been the same for both the House and Senate committees. Due dates have sometimes been as early as April or as late as October and have fallen within every month between except August (due to the annually scheduled recess). The decision regarding when to set committee response dates may be influenced by various factors. One factor may be a desire to achieve the President's legislative priorities as quickly as possible, particularly in the first year of his term. For instance, in 2001, President George W. Bush proposed the enactment of revenue reductions. Congress used reconciliation to consider revenue reduction legislation, setting a May due date for committee submissions and clearing the measure for the President by May 26. Conversely, submission deadlines may be set for later in the session when the need for extensive negotiations is foreseen. For example, the FY1996 budget resolution was adopted on June 29, but the submission date for reconciliation legislation was September 22. In 1990, prolonged negotiations with the President over a "budget summit" agreement delayed the adoption of the budget resolution until October, which also prolonged the triggering of the reconciliation process. As a result, the FY1991 budget resolution set a submission deadline in both chambers of October 15, five days after the annual budget resolution was agreed to. When a single committee is directed to report multiple pieces of reconciliation legislation, staggered deadlines may be used to regulate the pace of legislative activity. For example, the reconciliation instructions included in the FY2006 budget resolution in 2005 included three sets of instructions for the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee with three different due dates. These due dates were staggered with a week between each, allowing the committees time to develop and report legislation to satisfy each individual directive. The Budget Act includes a budget process timetable stating that Congress is to complete action on reconciliation legislation on or before June 15.