Speaker Mike Johnson speaks on getting Trump’s agenda jump-started with reconciliation bill

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Sunday that he wants the House to pass one hefty budget reconciliation bill to realize President-elect Donald Trump‘s policy agenda during the early months of his second term, dealing with a broad range of issues such as border security, tax cut extensions, the U.S. economy, and energy.

In an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo noted that new Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been pushing for splitting the legislation into two reconciliation bills and asked Johnson what Trump prefers.

“Yes, he and I have talked about this quite a bit, as you might imagine, over the last few months, determining the pros and cons of the two different strategies,” Johnson said. “I respect Lindsey Graham and all my friends who kind of preferred a two-step strategy. The idea would be: get something done on the border and maybe defense spending right out of the blocks very quickly in what we would call a skinny reconciliation bill, and then do the rest of it in a larger chunk later.”

Johnson, who huddled with colleagues over the weekend at Fort McNair to discuss the plan, said he thought “at the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, ‘one big, beautiful bill.’ And there’s a lot of merit to that, because we can put it all together, one big up-or-down vote, which can save the country, quite literally, because there are so many elements to it. And it’ll give us a little bit more time to negotiate that and get it right.”