Johnson tells House Republicans that Trump wants one ‘big beautiful’ reconciliation package

Speaker Mike Johnson told Republicans on Saturday that President-elect Donald Trump wants one reconciliation package, instead of the planned two that Republican leadership has been pushing, three people in the room where discussions took place told POLITICO.

Johnson’s message came as Republicans are meeting behind closed doors at Fort McNair to map out their strategy for passing a sweeping border, tax and energy package that will be the heart of their legislative agenda. Trump told Johnson that he wants “one big beautiful bill,” the Louisiana Republican recounted at the retreat, per three lawmakers.

Trump’s decision is a break from Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s pitch for a two-bill strategy that would have seen Republicans pass a border and energy bill first followed by a tax bill. Johnson had also previously indicated there would be two bills — though that was viewed as more of a deference to Trump’s perceived preference and a way to notch quick wins for his agenda. Thune stopped by the House GOP retreat on Saturday, a person familiar confirmed to POLITICO.

Trump’s decision is a win for House Ways & Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who has pushed for Republicans to pass one bill instead of two. Smith and his allies warned that separating the tax package into its own reconciliation bill risked them not passing a measure at all to extend the 2017 tax cuts set to expire at year's end.

Every step of the process will require near unity among congressional Republicans, who are currently working with only a one-vote margin in the House.

"We can't lose anyone," Smith said in a brief interview after the GOP retreat.

Republicans have major divisions to bridge on tax strategy, and border and energy are viewed as sweeteners to help wrangle GOP votes.

"My only focus is to deliver on all of these priorities that the American people ask for — and that's tax, that's border, that's energy," Smith said. "And I have always thought that the best process of doing that is through one."

Smith noted that neither party has succeeded in passing two reconciliation bills in the same year in decades. Most recently, congressional Democrats fought among themselves for much of 2021 and into 2022 to enact a second reconciliation package, abandoning much of the policies they envisioned under their "Build Back Better" plan that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act.

"Just look at history," Smith said on Saturday. "The Democrats couldn't even do it."

Smith is one of the lawmakers who presented plans to rank-and-file GOP members through a series of panels Saturday. Smith stayed behind after New Year’s Eve celebrations at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for meetings on reconciliation, according to two Republicans.

Trump’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Johnson also met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on New Year's Day, where they talked about strategy for 2025. Johnson has been tightlipped about the meeting but some House Republicans over the last few days have indicated that they increasingly expected to end up on the one-bill strategy and that it was backed in some corners of Trump’s orbit.

Republicans advocating the two-track strategy touted it as a way to score a win within the first month of the administration on one of the party’s major priorities — the border — while also giving Johnson more time to help pad his thin margin since he’ll soon lose two members to the Trump administration, bringing his majority down to 217 members for the immediate future. That strategy had high-profile supporters, beyond Thune, including incoming White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and members of the House Freedom Caucus.

And Republicans were already warning that the one-bill strategy means it will take months to get it through Congress, depriving the party of an immediate win within the first few weeks of a GOP trifecta.

“It can’t be the first order of business. It took us months to do the first tax cuts bill nine years ago. The bottom line is that, if that’s what the president wants, he’s going to have to wait until the summer for it all to get ironed out,” Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) told Fox News’ Fox News Live on Saturday.

It also throws a curveball into the House-leadership-struck agreement to raise the debt ceiling under reconciliation. House GOP leadership told members as part of last year’s government funding negotiations that they would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as part of the first reconciliation package and cut $2.5 trillion in spending as part of the reconciliation process.

But GOP leaders have yet to hammer out a plan across both chambers and coordinate with Trump, according to three people familiar with the ongoing conversations. They are discussing several options, including to deal with the debt ceiling as part of reconciliation, as Republicans had previously discussed.

“There is still a lot to figure out on debt limit,” a person familiar with the ongoing reconciliation conversations acknowledged.

But GOP members largely kept any concerns to themselves Saturday morning, with Republicans ready to defer to Trump’s strategy preferences.

“No one is fighting it. If that’s the Trump call, that’s the play we will execute,” said one GOP lawmaker.

Jennifer Scholtes and Benjamin Guggeheim contributed to this report.