(CNN) — House Speaker Mike Johnson informed Republicans at a closed-door meeting Saturday that Donald Trump favored moving his agenda as one sweeping package, according to sources in attendance — a key announcement fraught with risk but one that sets the stage for advancing the president-elect’s ambitious plans.
The effort to include border, energy and tax policies in a single bill is a shift from where Senate Republican leader John Thune has been, but it also represents an evolution in how Trump’s team has begun to see the legislative landscape over the last several weeks. A source familiar with this change told CNN it had become clear with the spending bill debacle and a narrow speaker’s race that there will be very little room to maneuver two separate bills — one on the border and energy and one regarding tax policies.
Thune and other GOP senators had argued that jump-starting Trump’s term with a border and energy policy bill — packed with widely popular GOP ideas — and punting on a tax bill until later in the year would be a better move politically than risking a dragged-out tax battle.
But several key Republicans in the House, including Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, had spent months pushing for a single bill, arguing that two measures would become too unruly in the chamber, where the GOP has an extremely narrow majority.
“It shows the best and quickest approach to deliver for President Trump is one beautiful, big package,” Smith told CNN last month.
A massive bill will take far more time to negotiate and will represent a huge challenge for a party that has so little room for error. A bill of this magnitude will need to go through several committees of jurisdiction and is likely to take far longer than a more constrained border and energy bill would. When Thune laid out his vision after clinching his role as Senate majority leader in November, he set an ambitious 100-day sprint to pass a narrow bill that addressed the border and energy but not tax policy.
While senators argued the strategy of two separate bills would help deliver an early win for Trump — as a tax overhaul plus border and energy package would take longer — many on the House side worried about squandering momentum for the rest of Trump’s agenda. Several House Republicans are concerned Congress might not get a “second bite at the apple,” according to multiple people familiar with the discussions, and do not want to leave out tax policy, which was one of Trump’s key campaign platforms.
As Republicans attempt to lay out a clear strategy for Trump’s agenda with his inauguration just weeks away, the promise of one single bill helped Johnson get reelected as speaker Friday, giving an early win to Trump — who had backed the Louisiana Republican and made calls on his behalf. It also helped the conference avoid a drawn-out fight, which the president-elect had warned could undermine confidence in the Republican takeover of Washington.
GOP Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia told CNN on Friday that Johnson and the Trump team’s promise to push one single bill helped get him to vote in favor of the speaker.
And Republican Rep. Keith Self of Texas, who flipped his vote and backed Johnson at the last minute, also told CNN on Friday that he looked forward to doing one “big, beautiful” bill now that the race for speaker was over.
Describing the conversation with Trump that led him to switch his vote, Self said, “The message was clear.”
“The message was that he wants what everyone else wants: his agenda to pass,” Self said. “And that was my message to him: ‘Mr. President, we need a strong negotiating team.’”
