Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kyle Risdahl, Tuesday, April the 15th today, tax day, according to the calendar and the law, I suppose.

But look, while you are heading to submit on your returns, what's happening in Washington is a whole lot of messing around with the tax code and a lot of other stuff.

So we're going to talk about that today.

Right.

We are going to dive into something that I have referenced a bunch of times in the podcast lately.

The reconciliation bill, what is also being called by some folks as the big, beautiful bill that Trump has promised that will extend his 2017 tax cuts, along with a bunch of other stuff that's in there.

So here to make us smart and talk about what is actually on the table, Caitlin Riley, a tax and

economics reporter at CQ roll call. Welcome to the show, Caitlin.

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

So first of all, where are we in the federal budget process timeline right now?

So what we have, so it's a two-step process,

first the House and Senate have to adopt identical budget resolutions that are pretty lean documents

in terms of details, but basically set up a framework for the budget reconciliation bill that comes later.

And we've just completed, or Congress has just completed, the first step in that process.

It took them a couple of tries, but now the Senate and the House have adopted the same budget

resolution, which allows all of the committees

who have been assigned either spending to cut or tax cuts to extend can now get to work

actually writing those bills and we'll see some details of kind of where this money is actually

coming from and going.

Could you explain reconciliation what it is, why it matters?

Yeah.

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