The purpose of the reconciliation process is to allow Congress to use an expedited procedure when considering legislation that would bring existing spending, revenue, and debt limit laws into compliance with current fiscal priorities established in the annual budget resolution. In adopting a budget resolution, Congress is agreeing upon budgetary goals for the upcoming fiscal year (as well as for a period of at least four additional outyears). In some cases, for these goals to be achieved, Congress must enact legislation that alters current revenue, direct spending, or debt limit laws. In this situation, Congress seeks to reconcile existing law with its current priorities. Since its first use in 1980, these expedited procedures have been used to pass 24 reconciliation bills. Budget reconciliation is an optional, expedited legislative process that consists of several different stages (as described below) beginning with 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 direct spending, revenue, or the debt limit. Once a specified committee develops legislation, the reconciliation directive may further direct it to report the legislation for consideration in their respective chamber or submit it to the Budget Committee to be included in an omnibus reconciliation measure. Reported reconciliation legislation is eligible to be considered under expedited procedures in both the House and Senate. As with all legislation, any differences in the reconciliation legislation passed by the two chambers must be resolved before the bill can be sent to the President for approval or veto. Congress has the option of including reconciliation directives in its annual budget resolution. These directives are necessary to trigger the reconciliation process, and without their inclusion in a budget resolution, no measure would qualify to be considered under the expedited reconciliation procedures. When reconciliation directives are included in an annual budget resolution, their purpose is to require committees to develop and report legislation and allow Congress to consider legislation to achieve the budgetary goals set forth in the annual budget resolution under special expedited procedures. 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 be in the resulting reconciliation legislation, and the time period over which the impact of this budgetary change should be measured. They might also include language regarding the type of budgetary change that should be reported as well as other procedural provisions, contingencies, and non-binding language concerning policy or programmatic direction. Section 310(a) of the Budget Act provides for three types of budgetary changes that committees may be directed to report: direct spending, revenue, and debt limit. The Budget Act also provides that committees may be directed to report any of these types of budgetary changes. Instructions have been in the form of directing a committee specifically to reduce or increase one (or more) of these types of changes, as well as to achieve deficit reduction. Any legislative committee with jurisdiction over spending, revenue, or the debt limit may be directed to report reconciliation legislation, and numerous committees have been instructed to report reconciliation legislation at some point. Because the Senate Finance Committee and the House Committee on Ways and Means have jurisdiction within their respective chambers over not only major direct spending programs but also all revenue and debt limit legislation, these committees have often been directed to report some type of reconciliation legislation when reconciliation directives have been included in a budget resolution. Reconciliation directives include submission deadlines to the committee(s). These have been set for various dates and so have allowed for varying periods of time for the development of legislative language by committees. While the budget resolution may direct a committee to report reconciliation legislation that would achieve a certain budgetary goal over a specified period, the Budget Act does not impose any additional requirements on committees. The directed committees, therefore, employ the same rules and practices used otherwise in their legislative work. In addition, the programmatic details of the legislation—including how the specified budgetary goals should be met—are left to the discretion of the specified committee. In general, a committee may report any matter within their jurisdiction, regardless of any assumptions concerning policy or programmatic direction indicated in the budget resolution. If a committee is given more than one directive—for instance, both to increase revenues and to decrease spending—then the committee may respond with separate recommendations. Under current Senate practice, the language in Section 310(a) is interpreted to mean that no more than one measure of each type would be eligible to be considered under expedited procedures as a reconciliation bill. Under current practice, therefore, as many as three measures could qualify for consideration under expedited reconciliation procedures in the Senate—but no more than one each for spending, revenue, and the debt limit. Compliance with the dollar amount set forth in a reconciliation directive is measured on a net basis. This means that legislation responding to a directive to reduce spending, for instance, could be in order even if it includes a provision that would increase spending for a certain program so long as the legislation, taken as a whole, would satisfy the overall spending decreases set forth in the reconciliation directive. Although a reconciliation directive may instruct a committee to report legislation that would affect spending levels, a committee may respond to the directive by recommending either changes to direct spending programs or changes in offsetting collections within its jurisdiction. Offsetting collections or receipts, such as user fees or royalties for water or mineral rights on federal land, are treated as negative amounts of spending rather than as revenues. Reconciliation directives pertaining to direct spending generally refer to changes in outlay levels. The outlay level is the projected level of disbursed federal funds. Outlays differ from budget authority (which gives agencies the authority to incur obligations) and are used to assess the impact of the legislative changes on the federal deficit. Reconciliation directives may instruct a committee to recommend legislation that would increase or decrease revenues. Reconciliation directives to alter current revenue laws fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee. If a reconciliation directive instructs a committee to report legislation increasing revenues by a specific amount, that amount would be considered the minimum by which the legislation should increase revenues. Conversely, if a reconciliation directive includes instructions to decrease revenue, that amount would be considered the maximum by which revenue should be decreased. There is a statutory limit on the total amount of debt that the federal government may incur at any time. In the event that Congress determines the debt limit to be too high or too low, legislation can be enacted to alter it. The reconciliation process is one of three methods Congress has utilized used to consider debt limit legislation over the last four decades, although it is the least frequently used, being employed only four times. Once a committee has developed legislative language in response to its reconciliation instructions, the committee will then meet to mark up and 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. Although committees have often responded to their directives early and on time, there is no procedural mechanism to compel committee action prior to the date specified in the budget resolution or even at all. Committees have responded to their directive after the date specified, with no impact on whether the submitted language could be included in a reconciliation bill, if it had not yet been reported by the Budget Committee. A late response has also not had an impact on whether the resultant legislation could be considered as a reconciliation bill. In other words, late or incomplete responses to a reconciliation directive have not caused a measure to lose its privileged status as a reconciliation bill. If a reconciliation directive instructs a committee to report legislation reducing spending by a specific amount, that amount is considered a minimum, meaning a committee may report greater net spending reductions but not less. Conversely, if a reconciliation instruction directs a committee to report language increasing direct spending by a certain amount, that amount would be considered the maximum by which spending should be increased. When either the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee receives instructions concerning both spending and revenues, the Budget Act provides some flexibility concerning how they may respond with a combination of spending and revenue changes. An example of such a directive is as follows: [T]he Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives shall report to the House of Representatives a reconciliation bill not later than May 18, 2001, that consists of changes in laws within its jurisdiction sufficient to reduce revenues by not more than $1,250,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2001 through 2011 and the total level of outlays may be increased by not more than $100,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2001 through 2011. Section 310(c)(1) of the Budget Act, referred to as the "fungibility rule," allows a committee with both spending and revenue directives to substitute changes in one for the other, up to 20% of each directive, as long as the total amount of changes reported is equal to the total amount of changes instructed. There is no procedural mechanism to ensure that legislation submitted by a committee in response to reconciliation directives will be in compliance with the instructed levels. If a committee does not report legislation, or such legislation is not in compliance with their instructions, however, there are methods that each chamber may employ in order to move forward with reconciliation legislation. In either situation, legislative language that falls within the non-compliant committee's jurisdiction can be added to a reconciliation bill during floor consideration that would bring it into compliance with its reconciliation instructions. These methods vary by chamber. In the House, if a committee has failed to recommend changes in compliance with a reconciliation directive, the Budget Act provides that the House Rules Committee may make in order amendments to a reconciliation bill that would achieve the necessary changes.