Relief isn’t a feeling that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) experiences all that often. Those rare moments when he can step back and savor a win are fleeting, replaced by the next big thing he’ll need almost near-unanimity to pass. Hours after last week’s miracle — passing a budget resolution that most considered impossible — the young speaker was back in the congressional pressure cooker, dealing with the latest emergency at his door: a government shutdown.

Congratulations were short-lived for the speaker, who delivered what the Senate never believed he could — Republican unity. “God parted the red sea once again,” Johnson told Family Research Council Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill” about the reconciliation plan that critics didn’t believe the House would ever agree on. As Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) explained to Perkins Monday, the idea that the GOP could rally around anything — let alone a massive blueprint for government spending and tax cuts — was such a stretch that “headlines came out during the vote that seemed to indicate that the vote had failed.”

Its passage was a shock to the entire political establishment, including the Senate, which had been running ahead on its own plan, insisting the House was too divided to accomplish anything. “It was a tall order to pass this ‘big, beautiful bill,” Perkins applauded the speaker, “but you got it across the line.” Now, everyone acknowledges, the real work begins. “It’s sort of the kickoff in what will be a four-quarter game,” Johnson told reporters, painting a grueling picture of the negotiations ahead.

Complicating matters, Hill insiders warn, is the ticking timebomb of government funding which runs out on March 15, setting up another nightmare scenario for the speaker. As usual, there are plenty of competing voices in the GOP — those who won’t consider a continuing resolution (CR) because it keeps Congress spending at the current levels, and others who think it’ll be impossible to keep making progress on a responsible budget without the extra time it would buy. Then there are Democrats, who are more than happy to let the government shut down if it would throw a wrench in the GOP’s extreme cost-cutting measures.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” the speaker lobbied for a clean CR (meaning no changes to what the government is spending now) to try to keep the government open until Republicans incorporate all of the savings Elon Musk has identified and other sweeping reforms into next year’s budget. “And then for FY26, for the next fiscal year, you’re going to see a very different process and a lot more efficient and effective spending for the people. We look forward to that.”

The president gave his blessing to Johnson’s approach on Truth Social, posting, “As usual, Sleepy Joe Biden left us a total MESS. The Budget from last YEAR is still not done. We are working very hard with the House and Senate to pass a clean, temporary government funding Bill (‘CR’) to the end of September. Let’s get it done!”

Of course, as Republicans are quick to point out, Congress wouldn’t be in this mess if then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) hadn’t stonewalled the process in 2024. “And I … remind people that we are in this position because last year, even after the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 11 of the 12 appropriations bills out of the committee,” Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said, “the Democrats under leader Schumer didn’t bring a single appropriations bill to the floor of the United States Senate. And they were available for the last six months of last year. So we have a pileup right now created by the Democrats’ own making.”

Regardless of where the blame lies, the solution will require every bit of Johnson’s needle-threading. While most people concede that there are only two options — either a full-year CR through the end of September or a month-long bridge to try to reach a bigger deal — the GOP will almost certainly need Democrats to pass anything that keeps the lights on. At least seven of Schumer’s senators will need to cross over to hit the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, along with who-knows-how-many-House-members if the speaker’s party dissolves into its usual hysteria over continuing resolutions.

And it’s not as if the work on the reconciliation bill stops over the next several days while this plays out. Republican leaders are still meeting around-the-clock to keep the president’s agenda moving. After the reconciliation package jumped its first hurdle in the House, Johnson said he was back at the White House the next day, meeting with the president, vice president, Thune, “policy folks,” and others to strategize “where we’re going from here.” Despite the rumors, the speaker says he and Thune are “working in lockstep” to make these energy, border, defense, and tax policies a reality.

“We have a very aggressive, very ambitious legislative agenda. Why?” Johnson asked. “Because the last team made a disaster of every metric of public policy. We literally have to fix everything. And so we have a big plan to do that [but] a short timetable in which to do it. And we also have, at least in the House, the smallest margin in U.S. history. [So] … it’s got to be a well-oiled machine, if that makes sense. And so that’s why we’re spending so much time on the discussions.”

To the speaker, failure isn’t an option. “Everybody needs to realize if we don’t get this mission accomplished, if we don’t pass this ‘one big, beautiful bill’ in reconciliation … it will mean that almost every American [and] the average household will have a 22% increase in their federal tax. If we don’t do it, it means 26 million small businesses in this country will [watch] their tax rates go up overnight at the end of this year to 43.4%. … We can’t do that. It’d be the largest tax increase in U.S. history. We must complete this mission.”

As far as the speaker is concerned, it all goes hand in hand with Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “We understand that the way to get rid of the federal debt and to get our deficits under control is to reduce spending. So we’re in a very exciting moment in U.S. history right now, because there are so many new dynamics that we’re able to use right now that haven’t been in place before. One of them is the DOGE effort. For all of the ways that Elon Musk has been maligned in this, and the Democrats are running around with their hair on fire, what he is doing is very important … going through all of the books and the data and the software of the federal government, of the deep state of the bureaucracy, to find these incredibly egregious examples of fraud, waste, and abuse.”

If Musk can find the $1 trillion in savings he believes exists in fraud, waste, and abuse across the federal programs, “it’s going to change the way we do the math,” Johnson emphasized, “change the way we do federal balancing of the budget. And you heard the president use those terms this week. He said, ‘We should get to a balanced budget.’ And we all said, ‘Hallelujah. That’s what we should do. That’s what we need to do. That’s what our families have to do. That’s what many state legislatures, state governments have to do.’ We should do it at the federal level as well, and we’re on track.”

That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy — nothing Republicans have attempted ever seems to be. Already, Thune is preparing voters for a long and arduous process. Not only does the House have to row in one direction, but the House and Senate will need to start viewing each other as allies, not competitors. “It’s complicated. It’s hard,” the majority leader warned. “I know there are some differences of opinion,” Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) admitted. “But to me, that’s a good place to start.”

Like Cornyn, most people don’t know “how many times the speaker can pull a rabbit out of the hat.” But the bottom line, as Moran observed, is that the time is now to try. “Because if we can’t do it as Republicans who claim to be fiscal conservatives, if we cannot do it with the trifecta in the House, the Senate, and a president that’s leading strongly in the White House, it will never happen.”