Last month’s dramatic demise of the House Republican healthcare reform bill is an important cautionary tale for policymakers as they proceed to make much overdue changes to our outdated tax code.

While members of both parties can agree that comprehensive tax reform is a laudable goal, much like the healthcare reform bill, it is the math, along with competing business interests and priorities, that may derail the process.

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First up, if Republicans choose a “go it alone” strategy for tax reform, they will need to rely on the same set of budget rules that helped to reveal the partisan factions among Republicans during the healthcare reform debacle only weeks ago. Moreover, this kind of “budget reconciliation” legislative strategy requires that any tax reform package not increase the deficit.

The benefit of this strategy is the politics: Republicans control the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and using budget reconciliation, they can pass tax reform needing only a simple majority in the U.S. Senate.

However, cutting the corporate tax rate — a stated goal of most proponents of tax reform — requires offsetting revenue losses that could amount to $1 trillion, depending on how much of a rate cut Republican deficit hawks can swallow.

At the same time, figuring out politically acceptable revenue offsets may be an overwhelming challenge in a budget environment where the national debt is approaching $20 trillion.

Prior iterations of tax reform have proposed paying for a corporate tax rate cut by eliminating a whole host of existing tax benefits for both corporate and noncorporate business owners.

By picking winners (corporations who get the benefit of a lower corporate tax rate) at the expense of losers (every other business owner who is not subject to the corporate tax rate and is, in effect, subsidizing a corporate tax cut by losing important tax incentives) Republicans risk further fracturing their majority.

In addition, by focusing exclusively on a corporate tax rate cut as a goal of tax reform, Republicans risk alienating millions of small-business owners that have been crucial to their electoral success.

Second, at the same time Republicans and the Trump administration are navigating through the trenches of picking winners and losers in tax reform, all while not increasing the deficit, there remain larger questions surrounding government funding, the overall $20 trillion debt and the debt limit.

These budget issues present a harsh reality for those looking to enact tax cuts, and the current congressional calendar could compound the headaches for policymakers. For example, Congress will have to vote later this month to continue funding the government as the current funding resolution expires later this month.

Along those same lines, the current debt limit expired on March 16. While the Treasury has been able to adopt extraordinary measures to continue to pay bills and keep the lights on, Congress will, in fact, need to address the debt limit’s expiration.

Both of these budget issues may require Republican congressional leaders to seek the support of Democrats as there is a strong faction of Republicans who do not support raising the debt limit under any circumstances. This thinking is both dangerous for the U.S. federal credit rating and the ability of the Trump administration to move forward with tax reform under a Republican-only budget reconciliation strategy.

In fact, these outstanding budget issues may have a fundamental impact on tax reform moving forward because Democrats, who are concerned that they are not currently at the table for tax reform discussions, will likely demand tax reform related concessions for their votes to fund the government and raise the debt limit.

Congressional leaders looking to move tax reform may need to think twice about a reconciliation strategy and focus more on developing a grand bargain to get anything done.

Donald Williamson is the Howard S. Dvorkin Faculty Fellow and the executive director of the Kogod Tax Policy Center at American University. Williamson is also the director of the Masters in Taxation program at the Kogod School of Business at American University.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.