The Most Powerful Woman in Washington
Meet Elizabeth MacDonough.
I often hear from readers asking why Democrats aren’t doing more to stop the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republican megabill that contains the bulk of President Trump’s legislative agenda, including cutting taxes, slashing spending on the social safety net, and increasing defense and border security spending.
And the answer is: Republicans are advancing the measure through the budget reconciliation process, which allows the GOP to pass the bill along party lines (as opposed to most bills, which require 60 votes to end debate in the Senate). There simply isn’t much of a role for Democrats to play in the process; Republicans don’t need their votes to get the bill across the finish line.
But there’s one exception.
In order to be able to use the reconciliation process, Republicans have to follow a narrow set of restrictions, including the infamous Byrd Rule, which was written by the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and a well-known stickler for the chamber’s rules. The Byrd Rule has several prongs: it forbids reconciliation bills from touching Social Security, for example, or from increasing the deficit outside of a 10-year window.
The most important thing the Byrd Rule says is that if the Senate is going to use the budget reconciliation process, the underlying bill actually has to involve the budget, i.e. it has to either change how much money the government takes in (through taxes) or how much it spits out (through spending). And the budgetary change can’t just be “merely incidental” to the provision, the rule says: you can’t use reconciliation to sneak in a policy change that just so happens to impact spending or revenue if those changes aren’t core to what the provision is trying to do.
And here’s where the Democrats come in.
Before the One Big Beautiful Bill goes to the Senate floor (potentially as soon as tomorrow), the two parties have to fight out whether the measure conforms with the Byrd Rule, a process that requires them to press their case to Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, the non-partisan official charged with enforcing the chamber’s rules.
That process has been playing out over the last week — and Democrats have succeeded in convincing MacDonough to strip out many of the megabill’s highest-profile provisions. So far, MacDonough has ruled against provisions that would have:
Made it harder for judges to hold the Trump administration in contempt
Exempt offshore oil and gas projects from environmental review processes
Chipped away at civil service protections for federal workers
Eased the way for the Trump administration to reorganize the executive branch
Then, this morning, MacDonough made some of her most consequential rulings yet, striking out parts of the package that would have:
Reduced the amount of federal money available to states for Medicaid
Lowered federal Obamacare subsidies and prevented subsidies from going to health care plans that cover abortion services
Prevented non-citizens from receiving certain student aid, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits
Prevented Medicaid funding from going to gender-affirming medical care
Those are some *big* decisions, because they strike out some of the reductions to the social safety net that Republicans are counting on to (partially) pay for the costs of extending tax cuts. Republicans can try to rework any of the above provisions in order to make them Byrd-compliant — but that will eat up precious time, making it harder for the GOP to meet their self-imposed July 4th deadline for passing the bill, now only eight days away.
The Byrd Rule gives Democrats really their only opportunity to mold the GOP package, and they’ve largely succeeded in doing so, by persuading MacDonough — the parliamentarian — to strip out several key parts of the bill.
But who is Elizabeth MacDonough, and how does she make these behind-the-scenes decisions that have shaped some of the highest-profile bills of the 21st century, from Obamacare to the 2017 tax cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act? The Byrd Rule process is pretty opaque, so I turned to two former Senate staffers — one Democrat, one Republican — who are experts on the federal budget (and know MacDonough personally) to help explain.
Let’s start by walking through the process.
It all starts with the majority party putting together a reconciliation package, as Republicans have done with the One Big Beautiful Bill. Then, the minority party goes through the package with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that might violate the Byrd Rule. At this stage, both parties can start meeting with MacDonough and her deputies informally.
“It’s kind of like office hours,” Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Democratic staffer, told me. The two parties meet separately with MacDonough, trying to get her initial assessment of their arguments as they plan for how best to make their case to her.
Then, the big event. After MacDonough has given her preliminary feedback, both parties sit down together to try to persuade her that a provision does or doesn’t violate the Byrd Rule.
Sometimes, this takes place in a fancy conference room, set up almost “like a court of appeals,” former Republican aide Rohit Kumar said, with the parliamentarian playing the role of judge and Senate staffers from either party as the litigants.
But, just as often, it plays out in a much less formal setting.
“You literally go to the parliamentarian office on the first floor of the Capitol,” Kumar explained. “It is not a huge space. It’s not the kind of space that is pandemic-friendly. Like you’re sitting on top of each other, right? You are breathing somebody else’s breath.”
“So you just pile around” the parliamentarian’s desk, with books and binders cluttered about, Kumar continued. “You’re standing around. If you’re lucky, you get a seat. But probably not. And you just hash it out, like it’s a mini oral argument.”
Then, a few days later, both parties receive an email with the parliamentarian’s ruling.
In Washington, this process of sitting down with the parliamentarian is known as a “Byrd bath.” Provisions stricken out of a package are known as “Byrd droppings.” (Yes, you are governed by children.) And because the obscure reconciliation process is now one of the primary ways public policy is made in this country, these informal meetings around MacDonough’s desk — which “can get heated,” Kumar admitted — end up shaping some of Congress’ most consequential pieces of legislation.
The whole thing involves a heavy dose of secrecy. Kumar compared the sessions to arguing before a court, but noted that — unlike in legal proceedings — the precedents MacDonough relies on aren’t publicly available. You can’t go online and search up previous rulings of the parliamentarian.
However, Kogan let me in on some of the “heuristics” that MacDonough is known to use to make her decisions.
“Elizabeth doesn’t like if you have a provision that literally only affects one entity in the entire country,” he told me. “Even if it has a budgetary effect, she’s like, that’s my proof that you’re doing policy and you’re not doing budgetary impact.” (Provisions in the GOP megabill defunding Planned Parenthood — which MacDonough has yet to rule on — could be implicated by this rule of thumb.)
“She also doesn’t want you to shoehorn something in with a budgetary effect that would otherwise not be allowed,” Kogan added. (He gave the example of trying to slip in a minimum wage increase not by outright mandating companies raise wages, but by imposing a higher tax on companies that decline to raise wages to a certain amount. That would obviously impact government revenue, but MacDonough would say the revenue increase is “merely incidental” to what the policy is trying to do: raise the minimum wage.)
“You have to understand her thinking,” Kogan said. “You make arguments that are meaningful to her, you absolutely tailor it. But unlike the Supreme Court, where you have nine people to work through, here it’s her and her staff.”
Depending on which party she is ruling against at any given time, MacDonough is often the subject of intense criticism. In 2021, when she ruled that a minimum wage increase was “merely incidental” to the federal budget, some Democratic lawmakers called for her to be fired (which has happened to parliamentarians before). This morning, after she struck out key provisions of the GOP package, Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was one of the “UN-ELECTED Deep State bureaucrats” trying to “destroy President Trump and THE PEOPLE’S agenda.”
Another Republican lawmaker called on Vice President JD Vance to overrule her (which no VP has done since 1975; more on that in a bit).
Both Kogan and Kumar have been on the losing side of her rulings in the past, but they both expressed admiration for MacDonough, a former Justice Department trial attorney who has worked in the Senate for 25 years, the last 13 as parliamentarian. “She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Kumar.
“Elizabeth takes her job really, really, really seriously and cares deeply about what she’s doing, and is not a hack,” said Kogan. “There are lots of Democrats who have decided she’s a secret Republican. Lots of Republicans have decided she’s a secret Democrat. Elizabeth is a straight shooter.”
“I don’t know better than a coin toss what party she is, if she’s registered with a party at all, or how she votes,” Kumar echoed. “I have no idea.”
The job also isn’t easy, both party hands noted, requiring MacDonough to parse very vague guidelines under pressure. “Like, what the fuck does ‘merely incidental’ mean? That’s not spelled out,” said Kogan. “It’s an impossible task.”
It remains unclear whether Republicans will extend MacDonough the same grace. Technically, MacDonough only has power because the Senate gives her power, in that they almost always listen to what she says. But they don’t have to. Her “rulings” are really just the advice of an unelected functionary. If a senator or the vice president moves to overrule her, the chamber can ultimately do so by majority vote.
Still, Senate Majority Leader John Thune pledged earlier this month that Republicans would heed MacDonough’s guidance, suggesting that the traditional power of the parliamentarian will be preserved.
The late Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) — the only person who served in Congress longer than Byrd himself — used to say, “I'll let you write the substance. You let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.”
In going through the Byrd Bath process, Democrats aren’t writing the procedures, of course. But they are using their knowledge of the procedures to take advantage of the one avenue they have to shape the substance of the bill, or at least slow it down and make it harder for Republicans to meet their deadline (or to rush the bill through without more public attention and debate).
“Republicans are going at breakneck speed,” Kogan said, which means they’re blazing through the steps of getting early advice from MacDonough to hone their arguments — to their detriment. “Another issue for [Republicans] is just that their staff are less good at this,” Kogan claimed.
He said he could “100% guarantee” that there are parts of the package that will be stricken out that didn’t need to be, because Republicans aren’t taking the time to make careful arguments or — with their July 4th deadline looming — aren’t going back to make changes to provisions that might make it through a second Byrd Bath with minimal tweaks.
As a result, with each passing day, the One Big Beautiful Bill is getting smaller.
And MacDonough’s job only gets harder. It’s wild to consider, when you step back, that every few years — because the Senate has a weird rule called the filibuster, and also a weird process called reconciliation that lets parties circumvent it, but also a weird thing called the Byrd Rule that limits how they can do that — this confluence of random factors combines to thrust this low-profile official into the spotlight and ask her to make decisions that end up impacting wages, and health care, and the global economy.
As Kogan said, it’s kind of like the Supreme Court, but instead of nine justices: it’s just her.
So my main question about MacDonough was: how does she carry herself? Does all of this go to her head? After all, you could argue that we all sort of live in an Elizabeth MacDonoughocracy.
The staffers who had worked (and tangled) with her with on several major issues said she doesn’t act that way. “There’s no hubris or holier-than-thou-ness or whatever you want to call it,” Kumar told me. “She’s a nice, normal human being that, episodically when parties are doing reconciliation bills, gets put in this position.”
This right here is why I find Gabe's daily column so appealing. Thank you, Gabe, for taking the time to help us understand this quiet yet incredibly important part of the legislative process.
“In Washington, this process of sitting down with the parliamentarian is known as a “Byrd bath.” Provisions stricken out of a package are known as ‘Byrd droppings.’”God I love this country.