House leaders have been in conversations with Trump for nearly a year to discuss policy proposals and craft an agenda for once they secured the White House and both chambers of Congress. Now Republicans are ready to begin making changes and overturning key Biden administration policies beginning on Jan. 20 when Trump is sworn into office. 

WHAT TRUMP HAS PROMISED TO DO ON DAY 1 IN THE OVAL OFFICE

“We’re going to ensure all this leadership will hit the ground running to deliver President Trump’s agenda in the 119th Congress,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Tuesday. “We will work closely with him and his administration to turn this country around and unleash, as he says, a new golden age in America.”

Republicans are expected to focus on an array of policy issues related to the border, energy costs, food affordability, and more. And to get things moving, Trump and GOP leaders plan to use a process called budget reconciliation to expedite their legislation. 

Reconciliation is a tool that allows the majority party to avoid the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold and pass legislation with a simple majority vote. There are limits to how many times it can be used and what types of legislation it can be used for, but reconciliation is often viewed as a hack for lawmakers to go around the minority party and enact key pieces of their agenda with a simple majority.

Democrats used reconciliation under President Joe Biden to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

Plans for Republicans to use budget reconciliation have been in the talks for several months, Johnson said.

“The budget reconciliation process is a very efficient means to solve a lot of that: everything related to the budget, spending, and all the rest,” Johnson said. “So we have lots of very specific plans on how to do that and the details of that will come together in the coming weeks.”

Johnson said Republicans will be more prepared to enact Trump’s agenda compared to his first term when the party was caught off guard and “precious time was wasted.”

“I know it well because that was my freshman year in Congress,” Johnson said. “We are not going to make those mistakes again. We will be ready on day one. We are prepared this time.”

Although it’s not yet clear the exact legislation that will be pushed through Congress through the budget reconciliation process, GOP leaders have indicated much of their focus will be extending and expanding Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, funding border security and immigration controls, and overturning the Biden administration policies, such as measures in the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Now that we have the trifecta, it’s finally time to counteract the Democrats’ negligence once and for all by turning our agenda into law,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said, pointing to some of House Republicans’ signature bills passed over the last two years that were never considered by the Democratic-controlled Senate. “And I have no doubt that this House Republican team will get it done.”

Johnson will meet with Trump over the weekend in Mar-a-Lago to discuss “details on the plan ahead” for a possible GOP trifecta next year. Although the race for House control has not yet been called, Republicans look poised to maintain their slim majority, securing GOP control in both chambers of Congress as well as the White House.