WASHINGTON — House Budget Chairman Jodey C. Arrington offered details on what a budget reconciliation bill could look like Friday, outlining an agenda that includes targeting fraud in the earned income tax credit program and finding savings in other means-tested benefit programs.

Arrington, R-Texas, and Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have stressed the need to provide additional funding for defense and immigration enforcement through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, which Republicans used last year to pass their “big, beautiful” tax and spending package.

In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on March 27, Arrington said extended funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement is needed to guard against “more shutdowns in the future with Democrats on the side of stopping deportations and putting our ICE agents at risk.”

Democrats have pushed for new restrictions on ICE agents in the wake of two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Some GOP lawmakers, including Graham, also are looking at reconciliation as a way to pass portions of a voter ID bill that President Donald Trump has made a top priority. That bill calls for requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote, along with photo identification at the polls.

“This bill will focus on ensuring ICE and other vital functions of homeland security, as well as the U.S. military and efforts to increase voter integrity, are Democrat-resistance proof,” Graham wrote in a social media post on March 26.

Graham said he would work closely with Trump and his team in writing the plan. After a budget resolution containing reconciliation instructions is adopted by both chambers, the instructed authorizing committees write the reconciliation bill.

Arrington said including the voting provisions is a “trickier one,” echoing widespread skepticism that requirements to prove citizenship in order to register to vote and show identification at the polls would not pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian because they do not have a significant impact on the budget.

“There are ways, I think, that you could creatively put incentive monies attached to voter integrity initiatives, whether it’s cleaning up the rolls or voter ID,” Arrington said. “It’s not as straightforward, again, as cutting waste and fraud or doing something like we did in the tax code” in last year’s reconciliation bill.

‘What the traffic will bear’

Talking with reporters last week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he anticipates reconciliation will be “fairly narrowly focused” on border security.

“Reconciliation is, it’s what the traffic will bear,” he said, citing the need for 50 Senate votes and 218 House votes. “We’ll get started on it here fairly quickly and start piecing together what that would look like.”

In the House, Arrington said, “we have a lot” of Republicans who want the cost of a reconciliation bill to be offset. The reconciliation effort should target “widespread fraud, there is a boatload of waste and fraud,” including what he said are $180 billion in improper payments.

In a report last year, the Government Accountability Office said that 16 federal agencies in fiscal year 2024 reported an estimated $162 billion in improper payments across 68 programs, adding that this figure “represents a small subset of all federal programs and does not include certain programs that agencies have determined are susceptible to significant improper payments.”

Arrington cited the earned income tax credit, a refundable tax credit that boosts the income of low-income workers, which he said “loses 30 cents on the dollar.” The GAO said in last year’s report that in fiscal 2024, this tax credit accounted for almost $16 billion in improper payments.

“You’ve got low-income housing tax credits, for example, another sort of welfare program within the tax code that doesn’t prohibit illegals from siphoning money off that and jeopardizing the sustainability of that program,” Arrington said.

Arrington said the next reconciliation bill should look for savings in what he said are 78 means-tested programs in the same way that last year’s bill cut costs from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid.

Based on Arrington’s comments, it appears no decision has been made on whether to use a fiscal 2026 or a fiscal 2027 budget resolution as the basis for a reconciliation bill.

“We could do two” reconciliation bills, he said. “We actually have two more bites at the reconciliation apple,” he said, referring to the potential of adopting two budget resolutions, both of which would have reconciliation instructions. “I think what’s important is that we do it responsibly.”

If Congress adopted a fiscal 2026 budget resolution with reconciliation instructions, the follow-on reconciliation bill would have to be enacted into law before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Taking up a fiscal 2027 budget resolution would give Congress longer to pass a reconciliation bill.

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—Jacob Fulton contributed to this report.

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