Trump and Republicans plot radical policy agenda in one ‘big, beautiful bill’

Donald Trump is working with top Republicans in Congress to devise a single “big, beautiful bill” that will contain all of his major policy ambitions – including a clampdown on immigration, tax cuts, and increased military spending in an attempt to supercharge his radical agenda as he embarks on a second presidency.

The plan to pile all of Trump’s main policy goals into one mega-bill, against the wishes of some top congressional Republicans, raises the prospect of months of potentially bruising political in-fighting needed to secure its passage. Though the Republicans hold both chambers of Congress, their margin in the House is the slimmest in almost a century.

“I’ll be dealing with the smallest margin in US history for much of the first 100 days,” Mike Johnson, the House speaker, told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, referring to the 119th Congress, which opened on 3 January. The perilous nature of that margin was on full display last Friday when Johnson secured his own re-election as speaker by only one vote.

Johnson confirmed to Fox News that the idea of cramming everything into a single bill was prevailing. The alternative proposal is for two separate bills – and is favored by the new Republican majority leader in the US senate, John Thune, and his fellow senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

“At the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, one big, beautiful bill,” Johnson said. “We can put together one big up-and-down vote that can save the country, quite literally, because there are so many elements to it.”

For his part, Trump boasted Sunday on social media that members of Congress would work “on Bill that will bring our Country back, and make it greater than ever before”.

“Get smart, tough, and send the Bill to my desk to sign as soon as possible,” Trump’s post said to Congress members.

The “big, beautiful bill” touted by Johnson would be pushed through the so-called “reconciliation” process, which allows budget-related legislation to be passed by a simple majority of 50 votes in the US Senate rather than the usual 60 votes required under the chamber’s filibuster rule. The process is likely to be fraught, as Democrats will be able to challenge any provision in the gargantuan bill that does not fall under the category of spending or tax policy.

Add to that the problem of the Republicans’ slim House majority, and the bill could be a recipe for a congressional fight of epic proportions. “There will be a lot of moving pieces, a lot of things to negotiate, a lot of opinions – we’ll be working long, long hours with whiteboards making sure every Republican is on board,” Johnson said.

Unlike the US Senate, where the vice-president has the deciding vote, the House has no tie-breaker. In the short term, the Republicans’ majority is likely to grow even tighter as Trump has tapped two House members, Mike Waltz of Florida and Elise Stefanik of New York, to join his administration.

Should the strategy of a solo mega-bill firm up, Johnson indicated that it was likely to contain several politically contested elements. They include extra funding for federal agencies to counter cross-border immigration, extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that are due to expire at the end of this year, and what the speaker called “dismantling the ‘deep state’”.

Trump’s second term begins on 20 January, after he led the White House from 2017 to 2021. He won November’s presidential election against Kamala Harris after losing the 2020 race to Joe Biden.