Speaker Mike Johnson laid out an ambitious timeline Sunday for a mammoth budget reconciliation package that would enact much of President-elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda in the first 100 days of his new administration.

The House plans to pass a single reconciliation bill as soon as April 3 that would incorporate border security, the extension of expiring tax cuts and an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit coupled with spending cuts, among other things, Johnson said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program. He said the Senate would then clear the package for Trump’s signature by the end of April or “certainly by May.”

Senate Republicans and a key faction of House GOP conservatives have been urging a two-bill approach, with border security and defense spending first, coupled with energy deregulation measures and offsetting spending reductions, before turning to the tax-cut package.

But Johnson made a public, emphatic case Sunday for a single-bill strategy using the reconciliation process, which could avoid a Democratic filibuster.

“I think at the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, one big, beautiful bill,” the Louisiana Republican said. While no one will like every element of the package, he said, “there will be enough elements in there to pull everyone along. So I think keeping it together is how we’ll actually get it done.”

Johnson also pointed to the political imperative of passing as much of Trump’s agenda as possible in short order. “That’s why we’re going to be so aggressive about getting this through in the first 100 days, because we’ll begin to see the effects of the economy very quickly and that will be important for the midterm elections in two years,” he said.

Johnson said Congress would need to adopt a budget resolution, with the reconciliation framework for various committees to fill in the legislative details, early next month in order to keep the aggressive timetable on schedule.

The speaker earlier detailed his strategy behind closed doors Saturday during a rare House GOP retreat at Fort McNair, an Army base in southwest Washington, after he was narrowly reelected speaker on Friday, telling members Trump had endorsed the single-bill strategy.

Larry Kudlow, a Fox commentator and first-term Trump administration economic official, initially broke the news Friday that unnamed Trump advisers favored “one big beautiful bill,” which Kudlow endorsed.

“That would include tax cuts, border closing, the DOGE brothers’ spending cuts, energy deregulation, and a ‘peace through strength’ defense component,” Kudlow wrote, referencing the unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency” co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Kudlow pointed out that much of the first year of Trump’s first term was lost to debate over the “repeal and replace” health-care reconciliation package, which passed the House but ultimately fell short in the Senate. That pushed back Trump’s signature tax cuts, which didn’t get done until just before Christmas.

“Let’s not waste any time — such as what happened in 2017,” Kudlow wrote, channeling the argument House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., has been making for weeks.

‘A nightmare’

But GOP senators were still pushing back on the one-bill plan, saying it was more important to focus first on border security and defense before turning to the more complicated issue of taxes.

“I’m very worried that if we don’t put border first and get it done, it’s going to be a nightmare for our national security,” incoming Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on the same Fox program Sunday. He said he was hoping to get a border security measure passed by Feb. 17.

“To the tax-cut wing of the party, I am with you,” Graham said. “But if you hold border security hostage to get tax cuts, you’re playing Russian roulette with our national security.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has likewise been pushing for the two-pronged strategy and did so again in an interview taped Friday for CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that aired Sunday.

“We have some immediate concerns, matters that need to be addressed, one of which is national security, given the increasingly dangerous world in which we live, and of course I would argue that starts with the border,” Thune said. “So border, national security, I think energy policy, energy dominance is a huge objective and goal, and I would hope that a reconciliation bill could also address that issue.”

Trump himself hasn’t commented yet publicly, and one of his top advisers — incoming deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — has publicly advocated for Thune’s two-step plan.

“Until Donald Trump announces his position himself a final decision isn’t made, and it is imperative DHS has funding needed to secure the border as quickly as possible,” a Senate GOP aide said Sunday.

And it’s not just senators who may resist the all-in-one approach pushed by Johnson. Over a dozen House conservatives, including Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., and the group’s policy director, Chip Roy of Texas, wrote to Thune and Johnson last month backing the two-bill plan.

Harris said Saturday on Fox that a single package would take much longer to complete.

“It took us months to do the first tax cuts bill nine years ago,” Harris said. “The bottom line is if that’s what the president wants, he’s going to have to wait until the summer to get it all ironed out. There are a group of us who support breaking it up into two pieces.”

Harris pushed back on concerns that lawmakers won’t be able to pass two reconciliation bills in the same year, arguing that the 2017 health care package was a much heavier lift than the straightforward border and defense package they aimed to pass quickly.

‘Zero room for error’

But Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., another Freedom Caucus member, said Sunday on Fox that a tax-cut package could be assembled relatively quickly, particularly because most of it would simply amount to extensions of existing law.

“We already know what it is, so putting that into this vehicle is not going to be overly complex,” Donalds said. Even “additives” such as Trump’s plan to exempt tips from taxes would not be difficult, he said, pointing to bill language he already compiled with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

But passing a sweeping reconciliation package by April would nonetheless by a huge undertaking as Johnson tries to govern with a razor-thin majority of just 217 members, once two members resign to take up posts within the Trump administration. Congress already needs to pass final fiscal 2025 spending bills before current funding expires on March 14.

And it will take considerable time to negotiate additional spending cuts in the fractious GOP conference that will be required to get enough support to raise the debt limit without any Democratic help.

Johnson said, “you have to raise the debt limit on paper so that we don’t frighten the bond markets in the world’s economy,” but added that “we are going to be cutting (spending) all along the way so we can do both of those things simultaneously.”

House GOP lawmakers have previously committed to $2.5 trillion in 10-year cuts, a big number that could have difficulty securing centrist GOP votes, to accompany a $1.5 trillion debt limit increase.

Conservatives, including those who initially held back their votes for Johnson on Friday, are sending a message that they could still move to oust him if their favored policies aren’t enacted.

Eleven Freedom Caucus members led by Harris and Roy — two more than the new threshold in House rules to trigger a potential “motion to vacate” the speaker position — laid out their demands in a letter to colleagues after the speaker vote Friday.

“Personalities can be debated later, but right now there is zero room for error on the policies the American people demanded when they voted for President Trump — the ones necessary to save the country,” the Freedom Caucus letter says. “We demand the House of Representatives deliver — quickly.”

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(Aidan Quigley and Paul M. Krawzak contributed to this report.)

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