Not everyone in Congress got a nice, long April break. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and members across 11 committees spent the last two weeks hashing through some of the major disagreements barreling toward Republicans in the “one, big, beautiful bill” Donald Trump is counting on to implement his agenda. And the hours are only going to get longer, the president warned.

“It is much more important that everyone stay in Washington this week to work hard and fast on all of it,” Trump declared on Truth Social. “You will be missed [at home], but your work is far too important to take any time off,” he insisted before adding, almost comically, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Of course, for the speaker’s team, long hours are nothing new. “I have a nap scheduled for sometime in 2027,” he joked to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “I’m looking forward to it.” On top of trying to deliver on the president’s biggest priorities with the most fragile of majorities, Johnson has been crisscrossing the country on a never-ending fundraising tour. But now that he’s back in the city, crunch time has officially arrived.

The House leader has been unwavering in his call to get a bill on the president’s desk around Memorial Day — which would be an ambitious goal for someone with quadruple his voting margin. Still, he told Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill,” it’s not like his party just pulled up seats to the table. “We’ve been working on it for over a year,” Johnson explained about the broad strokes of a budget plan. “It was March of last year when I brought in the

committee chairmen of all 11 committees of jurisdiction in the House that have direct involvement in this effort.” Even then, he pointed out, “We deployed them to go out and come up with their top five to 10 priorities legislatively to accomplish all these desired ends.” That work, he wanted people to know, “is coming to a head now.”

With Trump in the White House, he believes this is “the most consequential piece of legislation, arguably in the history of Congress.” But, the speaker cautioned, there’s a lot of “fine-tuning” to be done. That kicks off this week, as at least five House committees get down to the nitty gritty in their mark-ups, amending and voting on any changes to the legislation. A much touchier debate awaits next week when Republicans from the Energy and Commerce Committees get down to brass tacks about the ways they can slash the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid. Once everyone finishes their mark-ups — a herculean task in itself — the proposals will be mashed together and sent to the House floor.

For now, though, a few wild cards stand in between the speaker and his most significant victory to date. First, there’s his own party, which has very different ideas of what spending cuts and tax relief should look like. As everyone saw with the budget framework, the House will have to appease a group of hardline conservatives, who want to seize this moment to make a sizeable dent in out-of-control spending. “I have to believe and articulate with a straight face that we will be reducing [the] deficit,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) replied to the press, clarifying that whatever tariff revenue the White House is claiming would factor into his decision-making, because “Congress isn’t voting on that.”

Just because the president wants the House Freedom Caucus to fall in line doesn’t mean that they’ll accept less than what was promised in negotiations. “That is not happening,” Roy reiterated.

Then, there’s the opposite side of the GOP coin, the swing-state moderates, who are spooked at even the suggestion of cutting Medicaid and Social Security — even if those cuts are limited to commonsense housekeeping, like making sure only eligible people are participating in the program. “We won’t vote for something that takes away benefits from seniors, disabled, and vulnerable people that we represent who rely on Medicaid,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) told reporters earlier this month. And while the president and speaker have been crystal clear that these safety nets wouldn’t be affected (“If it cuts it, I would not approve,” Trump underscored), the wall of blue-state Republicans are a formidable obstacle.

And let’s not forget Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), whose only meaningful contribution to the debate seems to be obstruction. “As Democrats, we’re going to continue to stand on the side of the American people, and we will not rest until we bury this reckless Republican budget in the ground,” Jeffries declared.

Apart from the hyper-partisanship, one major unknown facing both chambers is America’s credit limit. For months, government officials have been keeping a wary eye on how much the country is borrowing and how soon we’ll hit our ceiling. Most experts have been pegging the day we max out Uncle Sam’s cards (known as the X date) somewhere between August and October, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been predicting that it could come sooner. During his confirmation hearing in January, he put everyone on alert that the U.S. could be “[on] the warning track sometime in May or June.”

Bessent’s agency is scheduled to give an update on how close America is to defaulting on its loans this week, and if the numbers track with the secretary’s earlier warning, then Johnson will have all the ammunition he needs to get the House and Senate cracking on a final bill. Privately, GOP senators have never been on board with the speaker’s Memorial Day deadline. They wanted to kick the hard conversations into the summer and produce a final package closer to August. But if the X date is looming, Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) chamber will have no choice but to put their foot on the accelerator on the one bill that includes a debt limit increase: the reconciliation plan.

“There is an absolute economic cliff ahead of us,” Johnson underscored to Perkins on Saturday. “We don’t know exactly what that X date is. But we have to assume — and I have to assume as the leader of this — that it will happen sooner than later.” The missing piece of this equation, the speaker explained, is that Bessent’s agency is still counting the tax revenue from April 15. “Depending on how that number is calculated, that will determine when the debt limit X date hits.”

While some analysts predict that to be late summer, “if the receipts are down,” Johnson warned, “it could be as early as June. So I have to work on that assumption. I have to think of June 1st as our deadline. So that’s why the deadline that we’ve imposed upon ourselves — Memorial Day — is so important.” There’s also the little matter of border security, he interjected, since those resources are rapidly dwindling in the race to mop up Joe Biden’s mess. They, along with defense spending, need to be replenished through this final legislation as well. “For all those reasons, we are racing against the clock to get this done, to provide a turbo boost and stability to the U.S. economy,” the speaker emphasized. “It cannot happen soon enough.”