On this episode of NUTT World, President Trump was elected with a mandate to secure the border and enforce immigration law,

revitalize our national defense, unleash America's energy resources, and cut wasteful and fraudulent government spending that has driven inflation.

To deliver on this agenda, Congress will need to fund these priorities.

Here to talk about the federal budget, spending priorities, and the budget reconciliation

process. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Herman Center

for the federal budget at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage, Stern was a congressional

staffer for over seven years. During that time, he served as a policy staffer for the Republican

Study Committee, where he was the

staff lead for their budget and spending task force and spearheaded their work to create

their fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2022 federal budgets.

Richard Richard, welcome, and thank you for joining me on Nutes World.

Thank you for having me on today.

I think it will be really helpful because, as you know, this is very complicated.

And so we want everybody to have sort of baseline knowledge. So let's just start

with a very simple. Can you explain the difference between a reconciliation bill and a regular

spending bill? Absolutely. And thank you for having me on for the conversation today.

I think as a lot of people are starting to learn more about,

you would think that having control over the House and the Senate means that you would well

have control over the House and the Senate. But the truth is, you need 60 votes in the Senate

to be able to clear a normal spending bill. And in fact, you would need 60 votes in the Senate to clear

any normal piece of legislation. And so the thing that a reconciliation bill does is it

unlocks a magic 50-vote threshold with the vice president as the tiebreaker to clear through

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