Congress is back in action. OK, that might be overstating it. In Donald Trump’s first 98 days in office, only five bills have been signed into law, amid a flurry of presidentially directed actions. Outside of shouting matches at hearings, Congress has gone into hibernation so far in 2025.

That theoretically ends this week, as markups begin for the “one big beautiful bill” in the House of Representatives. That’s the vehicle to permanently extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, layer on a bunch of other tax cuts Trump proposed in the 2024 campaign, boost spending on border operations and the military, and offset at least some of this with potentially trillions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, food aid, student loan programs, clean-energy incentives, and more. DOGE was the unfunny opening act; this is the main event, the entire Trump legislative agenda rolled into one bill. And the long-term effects of the Trump presidency, at least on domestic policy, will all be contingent on the success or failure of this effort.

It would be accurate to say that Republicans are closer to enacting this bill than they were on January 1, but they are not really that much closer. Yes, both the House and Senate passed a budget resolution to kick off the reconciliation process, whereby on-budget items can be bundled into one bill that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. But that budget resolution didn’t resolve the disagreements that threaten the effort.

For example, instructions given to House committees call for $2 trillion in deep spending cuts, while the Senate committees weren’t told to cut much spending at all. That’s OK for now—budget resolution instructions are a floor, not a ceiling, so senators can add in things later. But it’s an unprecedented scenario, and eventually a consensus must be reached between the chambers. While Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) made some vague promises about spending cuts to get the budget resolution over the line, it’s clear that consensus doesn’t exist yet. “They punted on the hard decisions but they can’t punt indefinitely,” said Brendan Duke, senior director of federal budget policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who previously served on the National Economic Council under President Biden.