Farm Bill in Reconciliation: What the Byrd Rule Exposes but Does Not Resolve

Budget reconciliation rumbles forward in Congress. The House of Representatives passed its version nearly a month ago (H.R. 1). As discussed previously, that bill effectively included reauthorization of the Farm Bill with some very notable changes to farm policy paid for out of cuts to food assistance (farmdoc daily, May 14, 2025; May 20, 2025; May 22, 2025; May 27, 2025; June 10, 2025). On June 11, 2025, the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (ANF) released its version of the legislative text for the reconciliation effort in the Senate (Senate ANF Committee, June 11, 2025). Largely a copy-and-paste version of the House Agriculture Committee’s reconciliation text, the Senate version would also make large reductions in spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) coupled with substantial increases in farm program payments and crop insurance. The legislation, if enacted, would effectively reauthorize the Farm Bill under the protections of the reconciliation process. Doing so would represent a fundamental change to the Farm Bill. The full reality of the implications may be better focused by some of the procedural complications in the Senate, as discussed herein.

Background

Budget reconciliation has mutated significantly since it was enacted as part of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Reform Act of 1974 (P.L. 93-344, Sec. 310; farmdoc daily, March 13, 2025). Designed as a method to revisit budget and spending matters near the end of the fiscal year, allowing Congress to make revisions due to changed circumstances, reconciliation now works via instructions in a concurrent budget resolution between the House and Senate; instructed committees report legislation that would change laws to achieve the instruction, which are compiled into a single, omnibus legislative vehicle that is considered under special rules (2 U.S.C. §641). Among other things, reconciliation receives fast-track consideration in both chambers, avoiding Senate rules for debate and filibuster and allowing the legislation to be passed without the 60-vote requirement.

To date, reconciliation has been required to abide by specific rules. The most notable of the rules in the Senate precludes the inclusion of non-budgetary or extraneous matters in reconciliation text. It is commonly known as the Byrd rule, named for the late Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) (2 U.S.C. §644; Heniff, 2022). During Senate debate on the amendment that created the rule, Senator Byrd raised concerns about “the Pandora’s box which has been opened to the abuse of the reconciliation process” by committee majorities seeking to “include in reconciliation recommendations to the Budget Committee any measure, no matter how controversial,” in order to take advantage of the “ironclad built-in time agreement that limits debate, plus time on amendments and motions” (Congressional Record, October 24, 1985, at 28967-68). Reconciliation “was never meant to be used as it is being used,” he added, and that it “was never foreseen” that reconciliation “would be used in that way.” While the abuses were problematic for the budget process, Senator Byrd was more concerned about the threat it posed to the “deliberate process in th[e] U.S. Senate,” and he demanded that “action must be taken now to stop this abuse of the budget process” (Id.). The Senate adopted the amendment by a vote of 96 to 0 (Id., at 28974).

The Senate has modified and expanded the Byrd rule since 1985, but the primary goal of the rule remains to prevent abuse of the expedited reconciliation process by including controversial provisions that can avoid the deliberative challenges inherent in Senate consideration (Heniff, 2022).To comply, reconciliation legislation must not include any provision that is extraneous, which is defined as a provision that: (1) does not produce a change in outlays or revenues, or the changes in outlays or revenues fail to meet the instructions to the committee, or increases “net outlays” during any fiscal year after the fiscal years covered by the reconciliation instruction; (2) is not within the jurisdiction of the committee reporting it; and (3) “produces changes in outlays or revenues which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision” (2 U.S.C. §644).

The concurrent budget resolution that set in motion reconciliation notably included different reconciliation instructions for the Senate and the House (H. Con. Res. 14). The instructions to the agricultural committees provided a clear example: the House Committee on Agriculture was instructed to produce legislation projected to reduce the deficit by at least $230 billion in fiscal years 2025 to 2034; the Senate ANF Committee was instructed to report legislation that reduced the deficit by at least $1 billion in fiscal years 2025 to 2024. To survive the Byrd rule, therefore, each Farm Bill provision included in the Senate text must not be extraneous to the Senate instruction based on a determination made by the Senate Parliamentarian, or the provision is subject to a point of order on the Senate floor (Heniff, 2022).

Discussion

The Byrd rule exposes two categories of questions for the reconciliation text. There are the technical, procedural questions about whether specific provisions comply with the statutory requirements. As noted, these will be likely be answered, if at all, by the Parliamentarian and Senate procedure (i.e., points of order and rulings on the floor). The Byrd rule also exposes bigger, more fundamental questions that are political in nature and involve the institutional concerns raised by Senator Byrd when he proposed the rule. Review by the Parliamentarian will not resolve the questions in this category, although important clues could be available from any rulings on specific provisions.

Arguably, the heart of the Byrd rule is to prevent inclusion of any provisions that produce “changes in outlays or revenues which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision” (2 U.S.C. §644 (emphasis added). This part of the rule intends to preserve institutional integrity by preventing committee majorities from abusing the budget process. Such abuse results from attempting to revise policy—especially seeking to make politically controversial and difficult-to-pass revisions, ones that might not withstand the deliberative scrutiny of regular order—as opposed to complying with the budget instruction. It is a matter of emphasis or priority: whether the changes proposed in the text are primarily for budget purposes (and thus procedural for achieving the instruction), or whether they are primarily for policy (and thus political) purposes that achieve the instruction secondarily or by necessity. It is conceivable that a provision could be ruled to comply technically but still violate the spirit of the rule, or its intent.

The Senate copy of the House legislative text (with some revisions) provides a useful case study. Reauthorizing much of the Farm Bill in budget reconciliation is extremely controversial. Congress has been unable to reauthorize it since expiration in 2023. Last year, moreover, the House Agriculture Committee reported a bill for Farm Bill reauthorization that never made it to the House floor, nor was it considered by the Rules Committee. The Senate ANF Committee was unable to even begin the reauthorization effort, let alone complete it. Moreover, the provisions that caused such controversy—reductions to food assistance and increases to farm assistance—are contained in the reconciliation text and, in the case of reductions to food assistance, increased substantially. Note that CBO scored the 2024 House Farm Bill reauthorization provisions for SNAP as producing a net savings of just over $20 billion; the CBO score for the 2025 budget reconciliation provisions for SNAP cut the program by $300 billion—more than ten times the reductions in the program than were unable to pass last year.

For more than fifty years, Farm Bills have been reauthorized by a coalition that included both food assistance to low-income households and farm assistance. Over time, a cardinal political rule developed such that neither farm nor food assistance funding was to be used to offset increased costs of the other. The House bill clearly violated that political rule, and the Senate bill does the same. In fact, the Senate bill may be worse or more troubling because it received a much smaller reconciliation instruction of only $1 billion (over 10 fiscal years) but is going much further than the instruction. By largely copying the House provisions rather than writing text for its own ($1 billion) instruction, the Senate ANF Committee highlights how much the goal is policy and political, not budgetary. In a very important sense, therefore, the institutional issues contained in the Byrd rule have been initially answered by inclusion of Farm Bill reauthorization in budget reconciliation. The Byrd rule exposes this but does not resolve it.

Concluding Thoughts

The massive, omnibus budget reconciliation bill faces its next tests in the United States Senate. Including Farm Bill reauthorization in the reconciliation text may not matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. For example, CBO currently projects that the House reconciliation bill will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt by the end of fiscal year 2034 (CBO, June 17, 2025). The projected reductions to food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) barely make a dent in the overall costs of the bill. Including them and pairing them with significant increases to farm assistance does, however, raise difficult questions for the Farm Bill’s future and the political coalition that has made reauthorization possible for five decades. Reviewing the Farm Bill provisions through the lens of the Senate’s Byrd rule also exposes more fundamental and profound questions about Congress, legislating, politics and policy that are unlikely to be resolved by the technical procedures implementing the rule. Ultimately, what is the point of making significant cuts to food assistance or even healthcare if the entire bill ends up adding far more to deficits and the debt? How many of the policy changes in the budget reconciliation bill are similar in kind to the changes in farm assistance and what are the consequences? It could also be that the Byrd rule exposes the extent to which it is more of a gimmick than a rule, an effort to patch over the problems—the Pandora’s box—that had been opened by budget policy and reconciliation. For more than fifty years, federal budget policy has failed to achieve its purpose, but it has drastically upended the legislative process and altered policymaking. The current reconciliation legislation adds an exclamation point.