A top House Democrat mapping out how to leverage his party’s vast majorities in Congress next year to push through a sweeping economic agenda is considering using a filibuster-proof bill to muscle it through both chambers and to President Trump’s desk.
The approach, outlined by Representative Brendan Boyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat in line to be chairman of the House Budget Committee in January, would be one way of forcing Mr. Trump to either embrace or veto broadly popular measures to lower living costs.
Triumphant after electoral victories delivered them more than 255 seats in the House and at least 55 seats in the Senate, Democrats are weighing the best strategy for quickly delivering the affordability agenda they promised voters, including tackling the soaring costs of health care, child care and housing.
Mr. Boyle, the 49-year-old son of a janitor for Pennsylvania’s transportation authority and a school crossing guard, is now positioned to lead the way from his perch at the helm of the House panel that handles budget matters and sets spending priorities.
In an interview, Mr. Boyle said it was “worth exploring” using budget reconciliation — a tool that allows the party in power to bypass opposition from the minority and push through fiscal legislation on majority votes — to unlock the affordability agenda Democrats ran on, including reversing Medicaid cuts Republicans enacted unilaterally in 2025.
“I think any time we can pass good, popular, meaningful legislation, that only strengthens our hand in any ultimate negotiation with the White House,” Mr. Boyle said.
He also said he would like Democrats to forge a deal with Mr. Trump on the statutory limit on the national debt, ending what has become a perennial cycle of high-stakes fiscal clashes between the president and Congress that have repeatedly brought the country dangerously close to a federal default. Mr. Boyle has long pushed for legislation that would allow the Treasury Department to suspend the debt limit, subject to congressional override, rather than requiring an affirmative vote by Congress to increase it.
“He wants it raised,” he said of Mr. Trump. “We never again want to see a Democratic president have to have this held like a gun against their head, the same way it happened to Joe Biden and to Barack Obama.”
A sharp but sociable communicator, Mr. Boyle is part of a younger vanguard of House Democrats rising to the top echelons of the party. He said that no final decisions had been made, but outlined a scenario in which Democrats early next year would first try to pass their economic agenda with some Republican backing, which they would need to steer around a filibuster in the Senate. He suggested Democrats could then move to a partisan reconciliation package if they failed to win over G.O.P. supporters.
“It’s worth exploring reconciliation now that we have both the House and the Senate; however, I think it’s also worth exploring the fact that we’re 56,” Mr. Boyle said, referring to the number of Senate seats Democrats would control if they won a seat in Alaska, where their candidate was leading. “Are there four Senate Republicans who we could work with on issue X, on issue Y, to get things passed in a more expeditious manner?”
That strategy would be in step with what Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, has privately outlined to his caucus. He has said he is prepared to move to a filibuster-proof effort if Republicans will not back Democratic legislation meant to address cost-of-living issues.
Mr. Boyle said he would defer to Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader who is expected to become speaker, on whether the costs of an economic package would need to be offset by new taxes.
Democrats could try to pay for the cost of such a plan by rolling back tax cuts for the “megawealthy” that Republicans enacted during the first and second Trump administrations, he said.
Or they could not pay for them at all. Mr. Boyle said Democrats could argue: “Look, those folks passed a massive, $5 trillion bill and only paid for a fraction of it; we certainly shouldn’t be held to a different standard.”
In 2021, when Democrats used their governing trifecta in Congress under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to advance a legislative package through reconciliation, feuding broke out between the moderate and progressive flanks of the party over the scope and cost of the bill.
The House eventually passed a $2.2 trillion measure known as “Build Back Better.” But in the months of debate, centrists in the Senate pushed to narrow the measure substantially, outraging progressives, who then threatened to withhold their support for a separate $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Not yet at the helm of the budget panel, Mr. Boyle still vividly remembers the internal party churn that threatened to tank both bills and the multiday slogs he endured to pass them out of committee.
“When it got to the Senate, because of the math of 50-50, where every Senate Democrat could be king or queen, the bill got slimmed down considerably, about half of the size,” he said. “The name changed, and a lot of the things that I felt the best about in that bill were stripped out.”
“The biggest difference now,” Mr. Boyle said, “is 56 is a lot easier than 50.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
